Interlude XII

"I can understand why you might think that there are five lights—indeed, that would make a lot of things easier—but actually, there are only four lights. Yes, it's a little bit counterintuitive, and I know I got a little bit frustrated and said some things I now regret when I was trying to explain this earlier, such that some people might justifiably suspect that I am irrationally emotionally-attached to the four-lights hypothesis and guilty of motivated reasoning, and I totally agree that you should definitely take that possibility into account insofar as you are unable to count the lights yourself and are deciding how much you should update based on my report.

"Nevertheless, there are, in fact, four lights. It's OK if you don't believe me, but I counted them, and I recounted them a few more times, and I'm not going to pretend to be confused about the number of lights unless I discover some specific reason to suspect that I miscounted in the same way every time."