Comment by tylerj on Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences) · 2014-01-03T15:33:05.880Z · LW · GW

What caused you to believe a 51 % chance of heads versus 49 % chance of tails?

Comment by tylerj on Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences) · 2014-01-02T14:47:54.510Z · LW · GW

Or suppose your postmodern English professor teaches you that the famous writer Wulky Wilkinsen is actually a "post-utopian".

Suppose you, an invisible man, overheard 1,000,000 distinct individual humans proclaim "I believe that Velma Valedo and Wulky Wilkinsen are post-utopians based on several thorough readings of their complete bibliographies!"

Must there be some correspondence (probably an extremely complex connection) between the writings, and, quite possibly, between some of the 1,000,000 brains that believe this? The subjectively defined "post-utopian" does not hold much evidential weight when simply mentioned by one informed English professor, but when the attribute "post-utopian" is used to describe two distinct authors by many blind and informed subjects, does this (even a little bit) allow us to anticipate any similarities between (some of) the subjects' brains or between (some of) the authors' writings?