simplicio comments on Priors as Mathematical Objects - Less Wrong

24 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 April 2007 03:24AM

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Comment author: simplicio 11 March 2010 05:57:44AM 2 points [-]

Eliezer, I am very interested in the Bayesian approach to reasoning you've outlined on this site, it's one of the more elegant ideas I've ever run into.

I am a bit confused, though, about to what extent you are using math directly when assessing truth claims. If I asked you for example "what probability do you assign to the proposition 'global warming is anthropogenic' ?" (say), would you tell me a number?

Or is this mostly about conceptually understanding that P(effect|~cause) needs to be taken into account?

If it's a number, what's your heuristic for getting there (i.e., deciding on a prior probability & all the other probabilities)?

If there's a post that goes into that much detail, I haven't seen it yet, though your explanations of Bayes theorem generally are brilliant.

Comment author: komponisto 11 March 2010 06:10:29AM *  2 points [-]