whpearson comments on Taking Ideas Seriously - Less Wrong

51 Post author: Will_Newsome 13 August 2010 04:50PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 25 August 2010 04:41:27PM -1 points [-]

Further comments on Yudhowski's explanation of Bayes:

science itself is a special case of Bayes' Theorem; experimental evidence is Bayesian evidence.

Science revolves around explanation and criticism. Most scientific ideas never get to the point of testing (which is a form of criticism), they are rejected via criticism alone. And they are rejected because they are bad explanations. Why is the emphasis in the quote solely on evidence? If science is a special case of Bayes, shouldn't Bayes have something to say about explanation and criticism? Do you assign probabilities to criticism? That seems silly. Explanations and criticism enable us to understand things and to see why they might be true or false. Trying to reduce things to probabilities is to completely ignore the substance of explanations and criticisms. Instead of trying to get a probability that something is true, you should look for criticisms. You accept as tentatively true anything that is currently unproblematic and reject as tentatively false anything that is currently problematic. It's a boolean decision: problematic or unproblematic.

Comment author: whpearson 25 August 2010 05:00:04PM 5 points [-]

Both bayesian induction (as we currently know it) and Popper fail my test for a complete epistemology.

The test is simple. Can I use the description of the formalism to program a real computer to do science? And it should, in theory, be able to bootstrap itself from no knowledge of science to our level.