ata comments on Confidence levels inside and outside an argument - Less Wrong

129 Post author: Yvain 16 December 2010 03:06AM

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Comment author: ata 17 December 2010 05:36:10AM *  12 points [-]

What should we take for P(X|X) then?

He's addressed that:

The one that I confess is giving me the most trouble is P(A|A). But I would prefer to call that a syntactic elimination rule for probabilistic reasoning, or perhaps a set equality between events, rather than claiming that there's some specific proposition that has "Probability 1".

and then

Huh, I must be slowed down because it's late at night... P(A|A) is the simplest case of all. P(x|y) is defined as P(x,y)/P(y). P(A|A) is defined as P(A,A)/P(A) = P(A)/P(A) = 1. The ratio of these two probabilities may be 1, but I deny that there's any actual probability that's equal to 1. P(|) is a mere notational convenience, nothing more. Just because we conventionally write this ratio using a "P" symbol doesn't make it a probability.

Comment author: kmccarty 17 December 2010 05:45:26PM 4 points [-]

Ah, thanks for the pointer. Someone's tried to answer the question about the reliability of Bayes' Theorem itself too I see. But I'm afraid I'm going to have to pass on this, because I don't see how calling something a syntactic elimination rule instead a law of logic saves you from incoherence.

Comment author: XiXiDu 18 December 2010 05:02:46PM 0 points [-]

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on why you believe EY is incoherent? I thought that what EY said makes sense. Is the probability of a tautology being true 1? You might think that it is true by definition, but what if the concept is not even wrong, can you absolutely rule out that possibility? Your sense of truth by definition might be mistaken in the same way as the experience of a Déjà vu. The experience is real, but you're mistaken about its subject matter. In other words, you might be mistaken about your internal coherence and therefore assign a probability to something that was never there in the first place. This might be on-topic:

One can certainly imagine an omnipotent being provided that there is enough vagueness in the concept of what “omnipotence” means; but if one tries to nail this concept down precisely, one gets hit by the omnipotence paradox.

Nothing has a probability of 1, including this sentence, as doubt always remains, or does it? It's confusing for sure, someone with enough intellectual horsepower should write a post on it.

Comment author: kmccarty 19 December 2010 08:02:27AM 3 points [-]

Did I accuse someone of being incoherent? I didn't mean to do that, I only meant to accuse myself of not being able to follow the distinction between a rule of logic (oh, take the Rule of Detachment for instance) and a syntactic elimination rule. In virtue of what do the latter escape the quantum of sceptical doubt that we should apply to other tautologies? I think there clearly is a distinction between believing a rule of logic is reliable for a particular domain, and knowing with the same confidence that a particular instance of its application has been correctly executed. But I can't tell from the discussion if that's what's at play here, or if it is, whether it's being deployed in a manner careful enough to avoid incoherence. I just can't tell yet. For instance,

Conditioning on this tiny credence would produce various null implications in my reasoning process, which end up being discarded as incoherent

I don't know what this amounts to without following a more detailed example.

It all seems to be somewhat vaguely along the lines of what Hartry Field says in his Locke lectures about rational revisability of the rules of logic and/or epistemic principles; his arguments are much more detailed, but I confess I have difficulty following him too.

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