roystgnr comments on Probability, knowledge, and meta-probability - Less Wrong

38 Post author: David_Chapman 17 September 2013 12:02AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (71)
Tags: decision_theory jaynes multi-armed_bandit strategy probability meta-probability epistemology

Comments (71)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: roystgnr 19 September 2013 06:32:08PM *  4 points [-]

I'm looking forward to the rest of your sequence, thanks!

I was recently reading through a month-old blog post where one lousy comment was arguing against a strawman of Bayesian reasoning wherein you deal with probabilities by "mushing them all into a single number". I immediately recollected that the latest thing I saw on LessWrong was a fantastic summary of how you can treat mixed uncertainty as a probability-distribution-of-probability-distributions. I considered posting a belated link in reply, until I discovered that the lousy comment was written by David Chapman and the fantastic summary was written by David_Chapman.

I'm not sure if later you're going to go off the rails or change my mind or what, but so far this looks like one of the greatest attempts at "steelmanning" that I've ever seen on the internet.

Comment author: David_Chapman 20 September 2013 05:37:43PM 1 point [-]

Thanks, that's really funny! "On the other hand" is my general approach to life, so I'm happy to argue with myself.

And yes, I'm steelmanning. I think this approach is an excellent one in some cases; it will break down in others. I'll present a first one in the next article. It's another box you can put coins in that (I'll claim) can't usefully be modeled in this way.

Here's the quote from Jaynes, by the way:

What are we doing here? It seems almost as if we are talking about the ‘probability of a probability’. Pending a better understanding of what that means, let us adopt a cautious notation that will avoid giving possibly wrong impressions. We are not claiming that P(Ap|E) is a ‘real probability’ in the sense that we have been using that term; it is only a number which is to obey the mathematical rules of probability theory.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit