Adam Elga

And I thought, you know what?

I really kind of lie.

There's something to that.

Maybe I believe that.

And I happily, happily talked to them when they visited my seminar and taught a guest session.

And I said, guys, I'm really coming around to this view.

And they said, no, we've given that view.

We don't like it.

So we've changed places.

Here's the change places view.

And it goes back to something you said earlier in the conversation.

You were happy to point out that as between different theories –

We are under no pressure to assign them the exact same priors.

Some weirdo theories just deserve low prior.

That's one standard view.

Such as a theory according to which you are a highly misled brain in a vat.

This is the standard Bayesian story of how do you rule out such theories?

The answer is you don't rule them out.

They are intrinsically low plausibility and your evidence just is compatible with them.

It's compatible with the other thing and the other thing started out likely and it's still likely.