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polymathwannabe comments on Jokes Thread - Less Wrong
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Not an actual joke, but every time I reread Ayn Rand's dictum "check your premises," I can hear in the distance Eliezer Yudkowsky discreetly coughing and muttering, "check your priors."
Both of those authors are known to use English in nonstandard ways for sake of an argument, so I'm actually now wondering if those two are as synonymous as they look.
Eliezer's version obviously includes probabilities. I don't know if Rand used any probabilistic premises, but on my very limited knowledge I would guess she didn't.
Not as I recall, although I haven't read Ayn Rand in something like fifteen years. Her schtick was more wild extrapolations of non-probabilistic logic.
Pretty much. I've actually gotten in a debate with a Randian on Facebook about what constitutes evidence. He doesn't seem to like Bayes' Theorem very much - he's busy talking about how we shouldn't refer to something as possible unless we have physical evidence of its possibility, because of epistemology.
That's contrary to my experience of epistimology. It's just a word, define it however you want, but in both epistemic logic and pragmatics-stripped conventional usage, possibility is nothing more than a lack of disproof.