I don't understand Albert's position or the distinction he is trying to make. He says that If the world is deterministic and given his knowledge of the macro state of the world right now he thinks there is a 75% chance the Yankees will win the World Series this year. If things are deterministic then the Yankees will either win or they will not, but for practical reasons he knows he has limited knowledge of the micro state of the world so he can't be certain (or at least he shouldn't be) thus he needs to devise a number between zero and one to express his degree of confidence that his prediction express is a fundamental truth. As time goes on as he gains more knowledge he will need to change the value of that number, and if he is a professional gambler and makes many bets of that nature and if he updates that number according to the rules laid out by Thomas Bayes then he will maximize his profits over the long term. So if you say there is a 75% chance the Yankees will win it tells me nothing objectively true about the Yankees it just tells me something about your state of mind.
Hugh Everett would say pretty much the same thing because he also believes we live in a deterministic world. Originally he may have only a vague idea of which branch of the multiverse is being observed and so he thinks there's a 50% chance, but as time goes on and he gains more information he still can't narrow it down to one particular branch but there are a great many branches that he can rule out and so by using the exact same Bayesian statistical rules that Albert used he now says the Yankees have a 75% chance of winning the World Series this year. But again If the world is deterministic then that number says nothing intrinsically true about the Yankees, it just says something about the state of mind of the speaker who made the utterance. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv1s-Z51XEyExV4x8KctRsBxhWfK6Sa_8Ls6EAsSMpLNTQ%40mail.gmail.com.
