= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
RichardKennaway comments on What Bayesianism taught me - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (201)
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.)
It's a bit like learning thermodynamics. It may seem self-evident that things have temperatures, that you can't get energy from nowhere, and that the more you put things together, the more they fall apart, but the science of thermodynamics puts these intuitively plausible things on a solid foundation (being respectively the zeroth, first, and second laws of thermodynamics). That foundation is itself built on lower-level physics. If you do not know why perpetual motion machines are ruled out, but just have an unexplained intuition that they can't work, you will not have a solid ground for judging someone's claim to have invented one.
The Bayesian process of updating beliefs from evidence by Bayes theorem is the foundation that underlies all of these "obvious" statements, and enables one to see why they are true.
Yes, who knows how many other 'obvious' statements you might believe otherwise, such as "Falsification is a different type of process from confirmation."
Falsifying X is obviously the same as confirming not-X ... but confirming that the culprit was Mortimer Q. Snodgrass is quantitatively very different from confirming that the culprit was not Mortimer Q. Snodgrass, and like someone once said, a qualitative difference is just a quantitative difference that is large enough.