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loqi comments on You can't believe in Bayes - Less Wrong
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Well, PhilGoetz is claiming (if I am finally understanding him) that casting things in the light of believe/disbelieve loses information. To me--and to you also, it would seem--it gains information. It could be context dependent, but I can't think of a context* in which I would take it to mean something other than a statement about how probable something is, including the examples Phil gave in is post. We can't all be right...
In general I agree with the premise that things can be forced into bad terms by a less-than-helpful question, but I'm not at all convinced that this is a good example. However, I know that when I think to, I use the word "think" instead of "believe" because I think it's clearer, so on some level I must agree that "believe" leaves some sort of ambiguities.
*I'm completely excluding religious usages from consideration and will not mention this caveat again.
I'm pretty sure both of us are right in this case. I agree that "casting things in the light of" believe/disbelieve can be unacceptably lossy. I was responding to you claiming it's a "weird thing to do" to infer a 55-85 interval based on common uses of the word "believe". Same word, but context seems to derive different concepts. AFAIK, people simply don't tend to use the word in the 55-85 sense when they're talking about "important" things (e.g., you don't often hear things in the tone of, "I believe global warming is a serious problem, let me get back to you on that").
In common usage, "think" and "believe" seem only to differ by degrees. For me, re-reading my above examples under s/believe/think/ seems to weaken the connoted confidence.
I thought I must be weird since I seem to have been the only one that completely didn't understand the post initially. But perhaps I just lack this other usage entirely, or perhaps I still don't agree. (See my response to Phil above: http://lesswrong.com/lw/10a/you_cant_believe_in_bayes/ssc)
Agree. I don't like to give the impression that I'm more confident than I am.