SilasBarta comments on Metaphilosophical Mysteries - Less Wrong

35 Post author: Wei_Dai 27 July 2010 12:55AM

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Comment author: Wei_Dai 27 July 2010 02:55:44AM 4 points [-]

Indeed, the fact that there's nothing resembling a consensus among professional philosophers about almost anything you've described as achievements [...]

Really? As far as I can tell, the consensus for Bayesian updating and expected utility maximization among professional philosophers is near total. Most of them haven't heard of UDT yet, but on Less Wrong and at SIAI there also seems to be a consensus that UDT is, if not quite right, at least on the right track.

For many branches of learning, the key to success has been to mathematicize the areas.

But how do you mathematicize an area, except by doing philosophy? I mean real world problems do not come to you in the form of equations to be solved, or algorithms to be run.

Comment author: SilasBarta 27 July 2010 01:04:40PM 5 points [-]

Just skim the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy articles on probability and see how uncontroversial philosophers in general regard Bayesian inference. I think you'll see that they consider it problematic and controversial in general.