murat comments on Open Thread: July 2010 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: komponisto 01 July 2010 09:20PM

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Comment author: murat 02 July 2010 08:59:04AM *  3 points [-]

I have a few questions.

1) What's "Bayescraft"? I don't recall seeing this word elsewhere. I haven't seen a definition on LW wiki either.

2) Why do some people capitalize some words here? Like "Traditional Rationality" and whatnot.

Comment author: Morendil 02 July 2010 09:21:01AM *  4 points [-]

To me "Bayescraft" has the connotation of a particular mental attitude, one inspired by Eliezer Yudkowsky's fusion of the ev-psych, heuristics-and-biases literature with E.T. Jaynes' idiosyncratic take on "Bayesian probabilistic inference", and in particular the desiderata for an inference robot: take all relevant evidence into account, rather than filter evidence according to your ideological biases, and allow your judgement of a proposition's plausibility to move freely in the [0..1] range rather than seek all-or-nothing certainty in your belief.

Comment author: Nisan 02 July 2010 12:43:44PM 3 points [-]

Capitalized words are often technical terms. So "Traditional Rationality" refers to certain epistemic attitudes and methods which have, in the past, been called "rational" (a word which is several hundred years old). This frees up the lower-case word "rationality", which on this site is also a technical term.

Comment author: Oscar_Cunningham 02 July 2010 09:10:46AM 1 point [-]

Bayescraft is just a synonym for Rationallity, with connotations of a) Bayes theorem, since that's what epistemic rationallity must be based on, and b) the notion that rationallity is a skill which must be developed personally and as a group (see also: Martial art of Rationallity (oh look, more capitals!))

The capitals are just for emphasis of concepts that the writer thinks are fundamentally important.