Re: poly: What probabilities?

From: Peter C. McCluskey <pcm@rahul.net>
Date: Sun Apr 26 1998 - 09:16:55 PDT

 bostrom@ndirect.co.uk ("Nick Bostrom") writes:
>My point was that in the particular case consisting of our
>discussions about future events, the context often fails to
>disambiguate the term 'probability'. For example, a typical case is
>when McCluskey writes:
>
>"Here's a scenario which I would guess has a 0.1 to 10% chance of
> happening: 1) a self-replicating molecular assembler becomes able to
> manufacture...",
>
>I am not sure how I am supposed to understand the probability
>assertion he makes. It's not just a philosophical quibble, but a
>genuine difficulty I have in determining which sense of 'probability'
>he is using.

 Can you produce 2 reasonable interpretations of my statement which
have nontrivially different implications?
 There are enough ambiguities in the rest of my statement (reflecting
less than ideal clarity in my thought plus shortcuts I used to communicate
them) that I find it hard to believe that my reference to probability
is a limiting factor in the clarity of my message.

-- 
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Received on Sun Apr 26 16:18:30 1998

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