army1987 comments on What Bayesianism taught me - Less Wrong

62 Post author: Tyrrell_McAllister 12 August 2013 06:59AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 13 August 2013 10:22:38AM 2 points [-]

That's not what “expected” means in these contexts.

Comment author: owencb 13 August 2013 10:44:47AM 1 point [-]

I'm well aware of this. My point was that there's a subtle difference between "direction of the expectation" and "expected direction".

The expectation of what you'll think after new evidence has to be the same as you think now, so can't point in any particular direction. However "direction" is a binary variable (which you might well care about) and this can have a particular non-zero expectation.

I'm being slightly ambiguous as to whether "expected" in "expected direction" is meant to be the technical sense or the common English one. It works fine for either, but to interpret it as an expectation you have to choose an embedding of your binary variable in a continuous space, which I was avoiding because it didn't seem to add much to the discussion.

Comment author: RyanCarey 15 August 2013 12:37:00PM 1 point [-]

Maybe 'on expectation' is clearer?