I don't understand Popper's work beyond the Wikipedia summary of critical rationalism
FYI that won't work. Wikipedia doesn't understand Popper. Secondary sources promoting myths, like Jaynes did, is common. A pretty good overview is the Popper book by Bryan Magee (only like 100 pages).
without value
I posted criticisms of Jaynes' arguments (or more accurately, his assumptions). I posted an argument about support. Why don't you answer it?
You just have to get over the arbitrariness.
You are basically admitting that your epistemology is wrong. Given that Popper has an epistemology which does not have this feature, and the rejections of him by Bayesians are unscholarly mistakes, you should be interested in it!
Of course if I wrote up his whole epistemology and posted it here for you that would be nice. But that would take a long time, and it would repeat content from his books.
If you want somewhere to start online, you could read
If you want to make bets about the future
That is not primarily what we want. And what you're doing here is conflating Bayes' theorem (which is about probability, and which is a matter of logic, and which is correct) with Bayesian epistemology (the application of Bayes' theorem to epistemological problems, rather than to the math behind betting).
To suggest that something else is an improved method of doing science is nothing more than to suggest that it is a more feasible approximation to Bayesianism. These things are mathematical facts,
Are you open to the possibility that the general outline of your approach is itself mistaken, and there the theorems you have proven within your framework of assumptions are therefore not all true? Or:
It seems like the only possible room for debate is the choice of prior.
Are you so sure of yourself -- that you are right about many things -- that you will dismiss all rival ideas without even having to know what they say? Even when they offer things your approach doesn't have, such as not having arbitrary foundations.
What you're doing is accepting ideas which have been popular since Aristotle. When you think no other ways are possible, that's bias talking. Your ideas have become common sense (not the Bayes part, but the philosophical approach to epistemology you are taking which comes before you use Bayes's theorem at all).
Here let me ask you a question: has any Bayesian ever published any substantive criticism of an important idea in Popper's epistemology? Someone should have done it, right? And if no one ever has, then you should be interested in investigating, right? And also interested in investigating what is wrong with your movement that it never addressed rival ideas in scholarly debate. (I have looked for such a criticism. Never managed to find one.)
Why don't you fix the WP article?
I was directed to this book (http://www-biba.inrialpes.fr/Jaynes/prob.html) in conversation here:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/3ox/bayesianism_versus_critical_rationalism/3ug7?context=1#3ug7
I was told it had a proof of Bayesian epistemology in the first two chapters. One of the things we were discussing is Popper's epistemology.
Here are those chapters:
http://www-biba.inrialpes.fr/Jaynes/cc01p.pdf
http://www-biba.inrialpes.fr/Jaynes/cc02m.pdf
I have not found any proof here that Bayesian epistemology is correct. There is not even an attempt to prove it. Various things are assumed in the first chapter. In the second chapter, some things are proven given those assumptions.
Some first chapter assumptions are incorrect or unargued. It begins with an example with a policeman, and says his conclusion is not a logical deduction because the evidence is logically consistent with his conclusion being false. I agree so far. Next it says "we will grant that it had a certain degree of validity". But I will not grant that. Popper's epistemology explains that *this is a mistake* (and Jaynes makes no attempt at all to address Popper's arguments). In any case, simply assuming his readers will grant his substantive claims is no way to argue.
The next sentences blithely assert that we all reason in this way. Jaynes' is basically presenting the issues of this kind of reasoning as his topic. This simply ignores Popper and makes no attempt to prove Jaynes' approach is correct.
Jaynes goes on to give syllogisms, which he calls "weaker" than deduction, which he acknowledges are not deductively correct. And then he just says we use that kind of reasoning all the time. That sort of assertion only appeals to the already converted. Jaynes starts with arguments which appeal to the *intuition* of his readers, not on arguments which could persuade someone who disagreed with him (that is, good rational arguments). Later when he gets into more mathematical stuff which doesn't (directly) rest on appeals to intution, it does rest on the ideas he (supposedly) established early on with his appeals to intuition.
The outline of the approach here is to quickly gloss over substantive philosophical assumptions, never provide serious arguments for them, take them as common sense, do not detail them, and then later provide arguments which are rigorous *given the assumptions glossed over earlier*. This is a mistake.
So we get, e.g., a section on Boolean Algebra which says it will state previous ideas more formally. This briefly acknowledges that the rigorous parts depend on the non-rigorous parts. Also the very important problem of carefully detailing how the mathematical objects discussed correspond to the real world things they are supposed to help us understand does not receive adequate attention.
Chapter 2 begins by saying we've now formulated our problem and the rest is just math. What I take from that is that the early assumptions won't be revisted but simply used as premises. So the rest is pointless if those early assumptions are mistaken, and Bayesian Epistemology cannot be proven in this way to anyone who doesn't grant the assumptions (such as a Popperian).
Moving on to Popper, Jaynes is ignorant of the topic and unscholarly. He writes:
http://www-biba.inrialpes.fr/Jaynes/crefsv.pdf
> Karl Popper is famous mostly through making a career out of the doctrine that theories may not be proved true, only false
This is pure fiction. Popper is a fallibilist and said (repeatedly) that theories cannot be proved false (or anything else).
It's important to criticize unscholarly books promoting myths about rival philosophers rather than addressing their actual arguments. That's a major flaw not just in a particular paragraph but in the author's way of thinking. It's especially relevant in this case since the author of the books tries to tell us about how to think.
Note that Yudkowsky made a similar unscholarly mistake, about the same rival philosopher, here:
http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes
> Previously, the most popular philosophy of science was probably Karl Popper's falsificationism - this is the old philosophy that the Bayesian revolution is currently dethroning. Karl Popper's idea that theories can be definitely falsified, but never definitely confirmed
Popper's philosophy is not falsificationism, it was never the most popular, and it is fallibilist: it says ideas cannot be definitely falsified. It's bad to make this kind of mistake about what a rival's basic claims are when claiming to be dethroning him. The correct method of dethroning a rival philosophy involves understanding what it does say and criticizing that.
If Bayesians wish to challenge Popper they should learn his ideas and address his arguments. For example he questioned the concept of positive support for ideas. Part of this argument involves asking the questions: 'What is support?' (This is not asking for its essential nature or a perfect definition, just to explain clearly and precisely what the support idea actually says) and 'What is the difference between "X supports Y" and "X is consistent with Y"?' If anyone has the answer, please tell me.