Troy and Mycenae were not mythical cities -- they were described in many writings other than the Iliad. There wasn't much doubt that they existed.
What? I don't know of any writing that referred to Troy and Mycenae except the ones that directly related to the myths (I never said it was just Iliad of course, I mean the entire corpus of Greek myths).
We have a few Egyptian incriptions of the era that mention "Mukana" or some such, and perhaps a Hittite inscription that refers to some name similar sounding to Ilium, but those hardly count as "descriptions" -- just a mention of a foreign city/country name without evidence to its location or anything really relating to it.
The evidence of the myths were pretty much the only evidence we had about Troy and Mycenae prior to the physical discovery of their remains.
What? I don't know of any writing that referred to Troy and Mycenae except the ones that directly related to the myths (I never said it was just Iliad of course, I mean the entire corpus of Greek myths).
First, the question of whether the Trojan war was fiction is different from the question of whether the city of Troy was real and actually existed. It seems to me that during the first half of the XIX century there were claims that the Trojan war didn't actually happen but was just imagined by Homer -- but I don't think that the mainstream consensus of t...
David Chapman criticizes "pop Bayesianism" as just common-sense rationality dressed up as intimidating math[1]:
What does Bayes's formula have to teach us about how to do epistemology, beyond obvious things like "never be absolutely certain; update your credences when you see new evidence"?
I list below some of the specific things that I learned from Bayesianism. Some of these are examples of mistakes I'd made that Bayesianism corrected. Others are things that I just hadn't thought about explicitly before encountering Bayesianism, but which now seem important to me.
I'm interested in hearing what other people here would put on their own lists of things Bayesianism taught them. (Different people would make different lists, depending on how they had already thought about epistemology when they first encountered "pop Bayesianism".)
I'm interested especially in those lessons that you think followed more-or-less directly from taking Bayesianism seriously as a normative epistemology (plus maybe the idea of making decisions based on expected utility). The LW memeplex contains many other valuable lessons (e.g., avoid the mind-projection fallacy, be mindful of inferential gaps, the MW interpretation of QM has a lot going for it, decision theory should take into account "logical causation", etc.). However, these seem further afield or more speculative than what I think of as "bare-bones Bayesianism".
So, without further ado, here are some things that Bayesianism taught me.
What items would you put on your list?
ETA: ChrisHallquist's post Bayesianism for Humans lists other "directly applicable corollaries to Bayesianism".
[1] See also Yvain's reaction to David Chapman's criticisms.
[2] ETA: My wording here is potentially misleading. See this comment thread.