satt comments on Open Thread, August 2010 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: NancyLebovitz 01 August 2010 01:27PM

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Comment author: Torben 03 August 2010 06:51:08PM 2 points [-]

In an argument with a philosopher, I used Bayesian updating as an argument. Guy's used to debating theists and was worried it wasn't bulletproof. Somewhat akin to how, say, the sum of angles of a triangle only equals 180 in Euclidian geometry.

My question: what are the fundamental assumptions of Bayes theorem in particular and probability theory in general? Are any of these assumptions immediate candidates for worry?

Comment author: satt 03 August 2010 09:20:27PM 3 points [-]

Bayes's theorem follows almost immediately from the ordinary definition of conditional probability, which I think is itself so reassuringly intuitive that no one who accepts the use of probabilities would worry about it (except perhaps in the corner case where the denominator's zero).