tel comments on Einstein's Arrogance - Less Wrong

30 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 September 2007 01:29AM

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

Comments (82)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: tel 29 October 2009 05:17:08AM 0 points [-]

I like to think Einstein's confidence came instead from his belief that Relativity suitably justified the KL divergence between experiments in 1905 and physics theory in 1905. He was not necessarily in full possession of whatever evidence was required to narrow the hypothesis space down to relativity (which is a bit of a misformulation, I feel, since this space still contains a number of other theories both equally and more powerful than Physics+Relativity) but instead possessed enough so that in his own mental metropolis jumping he stumbled across Relativity (possibly the next closest convenient point climbing from the prior of Physics to the posterior including new evidence for the time) and sat there.

His comment just reflected a belief that new experiments were unlikely to yet be including the same new information he already used. In some sense, their resolution was not yet strong enough to pinpoint something more precise than Relativity.

Not to knock Einstein, of course. Just because you have new evidence drawing you to a different posterior hypothesis doesn't mean that the update is going to be easy. That's perhaps where the philosophy of Bayes runs into the computational limitations of today.