Well said. In considering your response I notice that a process P as part of its cost E has room to include the cost of learning the process if necessary, something that was concerning me.
I am now considering a more complicated case.
You are in a team of people of which you are not the team leader. Some of the team are scientists, some are magical thinkers, you are the only Bayesian.
Given an arbitrary task which can be better optimised using Bayesian thinking, is there a way of applying a "Bayes patch" to the work of your teammates so that they can benefit from the fruits of your Bayseian thinking without knowing it themselves?
I suppose I am trying to ask how easily or well is Bayes applied to undirected work by non-Bayesian operators. If I was a scientist in a group full of magical thinkers all of us with a task, I do not know what they would come up with but I reckon I would be able to make some scientific use of the information they generate, is the same the case for Bayes?
I expect it depends rather a lot on the nature of the problem, and on just what exactly we mean by "science," "magical thinking," and "Bayes".
I find, thinking about your question, that I'm not really sure what you mean by these terms. Can you give me a more concrete example of what you have in mind? That is, OK, there's a team comprising A, B, and C. What would lead me to conclude that A is a "magical thinker", B is a "Bayesian," and C is a "scientist"?
For my own part, I would say that the primar...
Today's post, The Dilemma: Science or Bayes? was originally published on 13 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The Failures of Eld Science, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.