Vulture comments on Open thread, Dec. 29, 2014 - Jan 04, 2015 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: MrMind 29 December 2014 11:10AM

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Comment author: Vulture 30 December 2014 01:09:02AM *  2 points [-]

In the Bayesian view, you can never really make absolute positive statements about truth anyway. Without a simplicity prior you would need some other kind of distribution. Even for computable theories, I don't think you can ever have a uniform distribution over possible explanations (math people, feel free to correct me on this if I'm wrong!); you could have some kind of perverse non-uniform but non-simplicity-based distribution, I suppose, but I would bet some money that it would perform very badly.

Comment author: Vulture 30 December 2014 06:37:25AM 4 points [-]

Damn, I didn't intend to hit that Retract button. Stupid mobile. In case it wasn't clear, I do stand by this comment aside from the corrections offered by JoshuaZ.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 30 December 2014 01:23:20AM *  3 points [-]

Consistency forces you to have a simplicity based prior if you have a counteable set of non-overlapping hypotheses described using some finite collection of symbols (and some other minor conditions to ensure non-pathology). See prior discussion here. See also here for related issues.

Comment author: Metus 30 December 2014 01:24:46AM -1 points [-]

Without a simplicity prior you would need some other kind of distribution.

You can act "as if" by just using the likelihood ratios and not operating with prior and posterior probabilities.