It’s hard to follow your argument, but how is any of this different from “someone thought X was very unlikely but then X happened, so this shows estimating the likelihood of future events is fundamentally impossible and pointless.”
That line of reasoning clearly doesn’t work.
Things we assign low probability to in highly uncertain areas happen all the time — but that is exactly what we should expect and is consistent with our credences in many areas being informative and useful.
It’s not that “it happened this one time with Wiles, where he really knew a topic and was also way off in his estimate, and so that’s how it goes.” It’s that the Wiles example shows us that we are always in his shoes when contemplating the yet-to-be-discovered, we are completely in the dark. It’s not that he didn’t know, it’s that he COULDN’T know, and neither could anyone else who hadn’t made the discovery.
It’s hard to follow your argument, but how is any of this different from “someone thought X was very unlikely but then X happened, so this shows estimating the likelihood of future events is fundamentally impossible and pointless.”
That line of reasoning clearly doesn’t work.
Things we assign low probability to in highly uncertain areas happen all the time — but that is exactly what we should expect and is consistent with our credences in many areas being informative and useful.
It’s not that “it happened this one time with Wiles, where he really knew a topic and was also way off in his estimate, and so that’s how it goes.” It’s that the Wiles example shows us that we are always in his shoes when contemplating the yet-to-be-discovered, we are completely in the dark. It’s not that he didn’t know, it’s that he COULDN’T know, and neither could anyone else who hadn’t made the discovery.