Adam Elga

If you think some of the theories are better than others, intrinsically better.

And then you get some evidence and then you update based on that evidence.

And that's your new degrees of belief.

Yeah.

And what I noticed about the fine tuning things that you said, and this is things many people have said, is that the criteria that scientists seem to be applying in those cases are,

much more specific and fine grained than what I just described.

For example, you didn't just say, oh, there's a constant of nature and it could have been anything.

And if it's this, the theory says it has to be in this strong range, that's unlikely.

No, you had some very specific things about, okay, well, if there's a theory that says that this certain quantity is

Really close to zero, but not exactly zero.

That's especially bad.

And that's something that you just couldn't derive out of plain, vanilla, neutral probability stuff.

It's like there's real scientific standards in there.

And it made me wonder, how do I square those two things?

That makes sense.

And the lesson I take from that is that the relevant prior –

that we're applying there is not the kind of thing that, for example, I think I have confident access to.

It seems like the sort of thing that one needs.

sensible education in physics to be able to cultivate.

That's just an interesting thing.