Luke_A_Somers comments on Rationality Quotes September 2013 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Vaniver 04 September 2013 05:02AM

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Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 18 September 2013 09:57:24PM 1 point [-]

Keep in mind that he and other physicists do not generally consider "probability that it is noise, given an observation X" to even be a statement about the world (it's a statement about one's personal beliefs, after all, one's confidence in the engineering of an experimental apparatus, and so on and so forth)

It's about the probability that there is an effect which will cause this deviation from background to become more and more supported by additional data rather than simply regress to the mean (or with your wording, the other way around). That seems fairly based-in-the-world to me.

Comment author: private_messaging 30 September 2013 01:32:43PM *  1 point [-]

The actual reality either has this effect, or it does not. You can quantify your uncertainty with a number, that would require you to assign some a-priori probability, which you'll have to choose arbitrarily.

You can contrast this to a die roll which scrambles initial phase space, mapping (approximately but very close to) 1/6 of any physically small region of it to each number on the die, the 1/6 being an objective property of how symmetrical dies bounce.

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 30 September 2013 01:36:32PM 0 points [-]

Such statements are about the world, in a framework of probability.

Comment author: private_messaging 30 September 2013 01:42:56PM *  1 point [-]

They are specific to your idiosyncratic choice of prior, I am not interested in hearing them (in the context of science), unlike the statements about the world.

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 30 September 2013 04:35:06PM 0 points [-]

That knowledge is subjective doesn't mean that such statements are not about the world. Furthermore, such statements can (and sometimes do) have arguments for the priors...

By this standard, any 'statement about the world' ignores all of the uncertainty that actually applies. Science doesn't require you to sweep your ignorance under the rug.