OrphanWilde comments on General intelligence test: no domains of stupidity - Less Wrong

8 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 21 May 2013 04:04PM

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Comment author: OrphanWilde 29 May 2013 01:18:28PM 1 point [-]

I'm curious to know how you expect Bayesian updates to work in a universe in which empiricism doesn't hold. (I'm not denying it's possible, I just can't figure out what information you could actually maintain about the universe.)

Comment author: Creutzer 29 May 2013 08:25:51PM *  1 point [-]

What exactly do you mean by "empiricism does not hold"? Do you mean that there are no laws governing reality? Is that even a thinkable notion? I'm not sure. Or perhaps you mean that everything is probabilistically independent from everything else. Then no update would ever change the probability distribution of any variable except the one on whose value we update, but that is something we could notice. We just couldn't make any effective predictions on that basis - and we would know that.

Comment author: MugaSofer 30 May 2013 10:19:04AM *  0 points [-]

If things have always been less likely after they happened in the past, then, conditioning on that, something happening is Bayesian evidence that it wont happen again.