= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Christian_Szegedy comments on Book Club Update and Chapter 1 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (79)
I think I was unclear. Here's what I mean:
Suppose our robot takes these two propositions:
A = "It's going to rain tonight in Michigan." B = "England will win the World Cup."
And suppose it thinks that the plausibility of A is 40, and the plausibility of B is 25.
As far as our robot knows, these propositions are not related. That is, in Jaynes' notation (I'll use a bang for "not,") (A|B) = (A|!B) = 40, and (B|A) = (B|!A) = 25. Is that correct?
Now suppose that the plausibility of A jumps to 80, because it's looking very cloudy this afternoon. I suggest that the plausibility of B should remain unchanged. I'm not sure whether the current set of rules is sufficient to ensure that, although I suspect it is. I think it might be impossible to come up with a consistent system breaking this rule that still obeys the (3c) "consistency over equivalent problems" rule.
I think it is impossible to decide this based on Chapter 1 alone, for the second criterion (qualitative correspondence with common sense) is not yet specified formally.
If you look into Chapter 2, the derivation of the product rule, he uses this rubber-assumption to get the results he aims for (very similarly to you).
I think one should not take some statements of the author like ("... our search for desiderata is at an end... ") too seriously.
In some sense this informative approach is defensible, from another perspective it definitely looks quite pretentious.