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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Causal Reference - Less Wrong
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Okay, I can see that I need to spell out in more detail one of the ideas here - namely that you're trying to generalize over a repeating type of causal link and that reference is pinned down by such generalization. The Sun repeatedly sends out light in individual Sun-events, electrons repeatedly go on traveling through space instead of vanishing; in a universe like ours, rather than the F(i) being whole new transition tables randomly generated each time, you see the same F(physics) over and over. This is what you can pin down and refer to. Any causal graph is acyclic and can be divided as you say; the surprising thing is that there are no F-types, no causal-link-types, which (over repeating time) descend from one kind of variable to another, without (over time) there being arrows also going back from that kind to the other. Yes, we're generalizing and inducting over time, otherwise it would make no sense to speak of thingies that "affect each other". No two individual events ever affect each other!
Maybe you should elaborate on this in a top-level post.
I edited the main post to put it in.
I will probably reskim the post, but in general it’s not clear to me that editing content into a preexisting posts is better than incorporating then into the next post where it would be appropriate. The former provides the content to all people yet to read it and all people who will reread it while the latter provides the content to all people who yet to read it. So you are trading the time value of getting updated content to the people who will reread this post faster at the expense of not getting updated content to those who will read the next post but not reread the present post.
I don’t have readership and rereadership stats, but this seems like an answerable question.
So in the end, we're back a frequentism.
Also, what about unique events?
Somewhat tangentially, I'd like to point out that simply bringing up relative frequencies of different types of events in discussion doesn't make one a crypto-frequentist -- the Bayesian approach doesn't bar relative frequencies from consideration. In contrast, frequentism does deprecate the use of mathematical probability as a model or representation of degrees of belief/plausibility.
Er, no, they're called Dynamic Bayes Nets. And there are no known unique events relative to the fundamental laws of physics; those would be termed "miracles". Physics repeats perfectly - there's no question of frequentism because there's no probabilities - and the higher-level complex events are one-time if you try to measure them precisely; Socrates died only once, etc.
What about some of the things going on at the LHC?