On Sat, Feb 8, 2020 at 12:48 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List < [email protected]> wrote:
> On 2/7/2020 2:36 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote: > > > You certainly have. The argument that output strings that give results > inconsistent with your observations have vanishing measure overall -- an > argument based on the Pascal Binomial and the law of large numbers -- > applies equally to all observers, whatever output string they observe. So > whatever data you observe, you conclude that the theory that is consistent > with that data is confirmed by the data. Which is useless, because you > reach that conclusion whatever data you observe. The law of large numbers > fails you when all possible outcomes are observed by someone or the other. > > > So if the experiment is to toss a coin six times, there will be a branch > of the MW where HTHHTHHHHH is observed > If you observe that result on six tosses, then something is seriously wrong :-). and this will confirm the theory that H's are four times as probable as > T's. But there will be many more branches where it is found that P(H)=P(T) > (252 vs 45). And in the limit of large experiments almost all > experimenters (in the MW) will find P(H)~P(T). Hence almost all > experimenters will conclude something close to the presumed true value. > But experiments are not conducted by polling all possible observers. One cannot communicate with those on other branches, so this is just silly. The experimenter has only his own data to work with, and he must make whatever deductions he can using only that data. This however depends on the assumption that each sequence of H and T occurs > in one branch of the MW. Other probability values, like 1/pi, are going > to require very large numbers of branches to approximate. > Irrelevant. Bruce -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAFxXSLRwFDyVv3VZhuE%3DFUprbMMuie2fU1Tcy_bGzZ1U1wTPDA%40mail.gmail.com.
