Adam Elga

Think about an analog in the case of predicting the future.

And this is going to Humean skepticism about the future.

Take a really simple world, like dot matrix world.

It's two-dimensional dot matrix world.

Two-dimension space, one-dimension time.

That's all there is.

Or actually, even simpler, it's a binary world.

There's just a series of binary signals on or off at every moment.

There's a very natural prior distribution that's uniform and it treats those as uniform and independent.

We know that if we start with that prior and we conditionalize, we end up thinking at every moment, I have no idea what's going to happen next.

And antecedently thinking it's antecedently likely that there's just going to be brown, you know, white noise.

That is the, I think the

skepticism about the future, analog of the view that is in the same spirit of what you just said, where you're really insisting on that very seemingly uninformed prior.

Notice how arbitrary and committal the prior has to be if it's to underlie the sort of inferences about the future.

And the hope is that the

biasedness of the prior I'm proposing is analogous to that.

Yes.

There is one objection to that view that I think, the view gets a little bit more plausibility because there's something, there's a bad consequence that might seem to come from that view that I think

can be dodged.

And I think it's worth going back to the case of the Potemkin and the enterprise.