Morendil comments on Book Club Update, Chapter 2 of Probability Theory - Less Wrong

8 Post author: Morendil 29 June 2010 12:46AM

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Comment author: Morendil 06 July 2010 11:51:52PM 0 points [-]

Book Club Update

Summary of the first part of Chapter 2 posted, and reading for the week (apologies for the late update). Questions for the remainder:

  • What role is "background information" starting to play in the exposition so far of probability theory?
  • At what point does Chapter 2 finally arrive at a formal definition of "probability"? What do you think of this passage from a purely literary standpoint?
  • What justifies the "finite sets policy"?
Comment author: Darmani 08 July 2010 02:49:58AM 0 points [-]

In some sense, the definition of probability is spread out among the whole chapter until the word is first used; as far as I can tell, the definition of probability he gives is "the unique real associated with a hypothesis where the product and negation rules can be applied without an additional transformation, and without breaking consistency with the desiderata."

I was actually thinking about how to give a concise and intuitive version of the Bayesian definition of probability earlier today, and find this very disconcerting. It would feel awfully wrong to echo everything bad I've heard about frequentism while relying on the measure theoretic definition of probability for intuition.