Sniffnoy comments on Bayes' Theorem Illustrated (My Way) - Less Wrong
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Comments (191)
I may not be the best person to reply to this given that I a) am much closer to being a traditional rationalist than a Bayesian and b) believe that the distinction between Bayesian rationalism and traditional rationalism is often exaggerated. I'll try to do my best.
So how do you tell if a belief is strange? Presumably if the evidence points in one direction, one shouldn't regard that belief as strange. Can you give an example of a belief that should considered not a good belief to have due to strangeness that one could plausibly have a Bayesian accept like this?
Well yes, and no. The Bayesian starts with some set of prior probability estimates, general heuristics about how the world seems to operate (reductionism and locality would probably be high up on the list). Everyone has to deal with the limits on time and other resources. That's why for example, if someone claims that hopping on one foot cures colon cancer we don't generally bother testing it. That's true for both the Bayesian and the traditionalist.
I'm curious as to why you claim that you can't program a computer this way. For example, automatic Bayesian curve fitting has been around for almost 20 years and is a useful machine learning mechanism. Sure, it is much more narrow than applying Bayesianism to understanding reality as a whole, but until we crack the general AI problem, it isn't clear to me how you can be sure that that's a fault of the Bayesian end and not the AI end. If we can understand how to make general intelligences I see no immediate reason why one couldn't make them be good Bayesians.
I agree that in general, trying to generally compute statistics in one's head is difficult. But I don't see why that rules out doing it for the important things. No one is claiming to be a perfect Bayesian. I don't think for example that any Bayesian when walking into a building tries to estimate the probability that the building will immediately collapse. Maybe they do if the building is very rickety looking, but otherwise they just think of it as so tiny as to not bother examining. But Bayesian updating is a useful way of thinking about many classes of scientific issues, as well as general life issues (estimates for how long it will take to get somewhere, estimates of how many people will attend a party based on the number invited and the number who RSVPed for example both can be thought of in somewhat Bayesian manners). Moreover, forcing oneself to do a Bayesian calculation can help bring into the light many estimates and premises that were otherwise hiding behind vagueness or implicit structures.
Guessing here you mean locality instead of nonlocality?
Yes, fixed thank you.