Three Worlds Collide assumes calibration is solved
Eliezer Yudkowsky's Three Worlds Collide (2009) is a first-contact novella designed as a thought experiment about naturalistic metaethics. The setup: a human starship encounters two alien species simultaneously.
The Babyeaters are a civilized species — they have art, empathy, stories — who consider eating their own sentient offspring a sacred moral duty. It emerges from their evolutionary history and they see it the way we see any foundational moral principle: as obviously correct.
The Super Happy Fun People are a vastly more powerful species who find all suffering morally abhorrent. They want to modify humanity to eliminate pain, and stop the Babyeaters from eating their children. They see... (read 869 more words →)
Deutsch's objection is not to Bayes' theorem itself but to the idea that updating numbers is what science is about. In his Popperian picture, knowledge grows through explanatory creativity and critical elimination, and the notion that evidence confirms or raises the probability of a sweeping theory is, literally, impossible.
According to DD evidence doesnt "confirm" anything. It never justifies belief or increases probability of theory being right.
Evidence can only falsify a theory outright. Or it can fail to find a flaw, leaving the theory "unrefuted for now."
There is no middle state in which evidence makes the theory more likely true.
The root cause of the problem as I see it is that hierarchies are often based on dominance, exploitation, and power accumulation, rather than moral or epistemic impartiality. This creates a system where trustworthiness is undervalued, and poverty persists. What we need is an accurate instrument to measure trustworthiness. Once we have that, hierarchies will change, the environment will change, and trustworthiness will become the foundation of success. Adoption of the trustwortiness instrument will ultimately eliminate poverty.