An Open Thread: a place for things foolishly April, and other assorted discussions.
This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.
Update: Tom McCabe has created a sub-Reddit to use for assorted discussions instead of relying on open threads. Go there for the sub-Reddit and discussion about it, and go here to vote on the idea.
I've written a reply to Bayesian Flame, one of cousin_it's posts from last year. It's titled Frequentist Magic vs. Bayesian Magic. I'd appreciate some review and comments before I post it here. Mainly I'm concerned about whether I've correctly captured the spirit of frequentism, and whether I've treated it fairly.
BTW, I wish there is a "public drafts" feature on LessWrong, where I can make a draft accessible to others by URL, but not show up in recent posts, so I don't have to post a draft elsewhere to get feedback before I officially publish it.
You can do better than frequentist approach without using the "magic" universal prior. You can just use a prior that represents initial ignorance of the frequency at which the machine produces head-biased and tail-biased coins. (dP(f) = 1df). If you want to look for repeating patterns, you can assign probability (1/2)(1/2^n) to the theory that the machine produces each type of coin on a frequency depending on the last n coins it produced. This requires treating a probability as a strength of belief, and not the frequency of anything, which is wha... (read more)