I wasn't especially impressed by Aretae's reasoning. For example,
Why would I not believe that the future will be different from the past? . . . This is silly. Bayes disposes of that rather rapidly. Unless one embraces radical skepticism (why should I believe in the past at all?), Bayesian statistics takes both theses (the future is different than/same as the past) and applies updating. What is left standing is the future resembles the past.
You will not be able to perform this updating unless you have already assigned prior probabilities to propositions connecting the past to the future. That's why Bayesian updating will never get it right if you start out with the anti-induction prior. Hence, to address Hume's problem, you have to come up with a justification for preferring certain prior distributions. We may have good reasons for preferring those distributions that posit that the past is like the future, but, contra Aretae, those reasons are outside the scope of mere Bayesian updating.
Well that's why I quoted one part and not the other.
A monthly thread for posting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently (or had stored in your quotesfile for ages).