SilasBarta comments on Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences) - Less Wrong

110 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 28 July 2007 10:59PM

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Comment author: SilasBarta 10 August 2010 02:42:18PM 3 points [-]

Yes, but that still doesn't show falsificationism to be wrong, as opposed to "narrow" or "insufficiently generalized". Lakatos and Quine have also failed to show how it's a problem that you can't rigidly falsifiy a hypothesis in isolation: Just as you can generalize Popper's binary "falsified vs. unfalsified" to probabilistic cases, you can construct a Bayes net that shows how your various beliefs (including the auxiliary hypotheses) imply particular observations.

The relative likelihoods they place on the observations allow you to know the relative amount by which those various beliefs are attenuated or amplified by any particular observation. This method gives you the functional equivalent of testing hypotheses in isolation, since some of them will be attenuated the most.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 10 August 2010 04:03:46PM 2 points [-]

Right, I was speaking in a non-Bayesian context.