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Tyrrell_McAllister comments on What Bayesianism taught me - Less Wrong
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Honestly, I feel like if Eliezer had left out any mention of the math of Bayes' Theorem from the sequences, I would be no worse off. The seven statements you wrote seem fairly self-evident by themselves. I don't feel like I need to read that P(A|B) > P(A) or whatever to internalize them. (But perhaps certain people are highly mathematical thinkers for whom the formal epistemology really helps?)
Lately I kind of feel like rationality essentially comes down to two things:
Recognizing that as a rule you are better off believing the truth, i.e. abiding by the Litany of Tarski.
Having probabilistic beliefs, i.e. abiding by the Bayesian epistemology and not the Aristotelian or the Anton-Wilsonian as Yvain defined in his reaction to Chapman, or having an many-color view as opposed to a two-color view or a one-color view as Eliezer defined in the Fallacy of Gray.
Once you've internalized these two things, you've learned this particular Secret of the Universe. I've noticed that people seem to have their minds blown by the sequences, not really learn all that much more by spending a few years in the rationality scene, and then go back to read the sequences and wonder how they could have ever found them anything but obvious. (Although apparently CFAR workshops are really helpful, so if that's true that's evidence against this model.)
I saw Yvain describe this experience. My experience was actually kind of the opposite. When I read the sequences, they seemed extremely well written, but obvious. I thought that my enjoyment of them was the enjoyment of reading what I already knew, but expressed better than I could express it, plus the cool results from the heuristics-and-biases research program. It was only in retrospect that I noticed how much they had clarified my thinking about basic epistemology.
That's very interesting that your experience was the opposite.
And yeah, I saw where Yvain wrote that he and a friend shared that experience, and I noticed that I shared it exactly as well. It also seems to match with attitudes I had seen around, so I feel like it could be fairly general.