...he doesn't see how that prevents, in practice, the experimenter from continuing to flip a fair coin until it shows an excess of heads.

He might perhaps find it illuminating to write some computer simulations along these lines, until he has been convinced of the point that you cannot, in fact, convince a lawful reasoner of anything you want, by deciding when to gather more data.

After all:  If that were possible, a lawful reasoner could plan to convince themselves of a fair coin being biased heads, by deciding themselves to keep flipping until it showed an excess of heads.  And then they would know in advance which direction they would update later, as is obviously mathematically impossible.

Huh?

It's magic math.  Earthlings will never be able to understand it.  It comes from another world and has inscrutable mystical properties like "If you start out thinking it's 70% probable that some coin is fair, nothing you can possibly plan to do by gathering more data, analyzing it a particular way, etcetera etcetera, can result in you expecting for that analysis to make you believe on average that the coin is not 70% probably fair."  All of the sinister misdeeds that 'p-values' are trying to prevent by, for example, not letting naughty experimenters gather more data whenever they feel like it, are just flatly mathematically impossible in the first place under this system.

What she's hoping at this point is that she can get a system set up where some Earthlings are using the magic math, even though it seems very 'subjective' and that makes for weird internal feelings that make them want to reject it, paying Earthlings enough to do it anyways, just, just trying it to see if it works, and maybe leads into less massive replication failures, and then they get interesting results that other people want to pay for, and the system can continue under its own momentum.  And prediction markets; and professional replicators; and impact markets instead of journal citation counts, for important results that really do reproduce, to establish purer accuracy incentives; and specialized analysts and specialized writers; and everything else the system needs to fix everything broken about it simultaneously, in one small part of it somewhere.

Thellim has three months left, on one of her dominant hypotheses about how this world works, before she suddenly starts thinking that likelihood functions are 'subjective' and meaningless and icky.  She has to build something that will sustain itself before then.

Yeah, nothing's getting built in three months, he's pretty sure.

Why not?  Why?  Three months is so much time!  It's 90 days!  People can do a lot in 90 days!  They just all have to make the correct moves simultaneously!  It's not that hard to coordinate!  They just have to look inside them for whatever makes them feel icky about the thought of coordinating and ignore that icky feeling, just once, just this one time, and they can maybe set up a fragment of real Civilization that would - that would, even if something happens to Thellim, be able to figure things out, put her back, eventually, to the way that she was -

He has to go.

Thellim is aware that Earth is not literally pessimal.  But sometimes it's hard to see how her situation could realistically be worse, anthropically speaking, assuming it's a requirement that she landed in a populated world instead of somewhere in intergalactic space.  It feels like this planetary setup is about as bad as a planetary setup could get without stuff actually collapsing.

...why couldn't she have just ended up in a regular fantasy universe, one where she'd have her own economicmagic already, and without her mind having been warped in the process?  Someplace that would actually listen to her, and let her improve it.

Maybe with a harem.  A harem of magical boyfriends would be nice.

She hopes the other dath ilani on the airplane ended up in better places.

Somebody has to be worst-off, after all.  With any luck, that was her, and the other dath ilani are in happier, less fraught, less dangerous situations than this.

(Return to the main Planecrash continuity.)