Oscar_Cunningham comments on Bayes' rule =/= Bayesian inference - Less Wrong

37 Post author: neq1 16 September 2010 06:34AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (70)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Oscar_Cunningham 17 September 2010 04:53:42PM 0 points [-]

Thinking about it further, there is no probability which is even numerically equal to the frequency. Probabilities are subjective, you know them or can work them out in your head. But you don't know the frequency, so it can't be equal to any of the probabilities in your head (except by coincidence).

Comment author: TobyBartels 17 September 2010 11:55:43PM *  1 point [-]

I think that it's a mistake to reserve the term ‘probability’ for beliefs held by actual people (or other beings with beliefs). In fact, since actual people are subject to such pervasive epistemic biases (such as we try to overcome here), I doubt that anybody (even readers of Less Wrong) holds actual beliefs that obey the mathematical laws of probability.

I prefer to think of probabiliy as the belief of an ideal rational being with given information / evidence / observations. (This makes me what they call an ‘objective Bayesian’, although really it just pushes the subjectivity back to the level of information.) So even if nobody knows the frequency with which a given coin comes up heads (which is certainly true if the coin is still around and may be flipped in the future), I can imagine a rational being who knows that frequency.

But in a post that was supposed to be pedantic, I was remiss in not specifying exactly what information the probability depends on!