roland comments on Rationality Quotes Thread January 2016 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: elharo 01 January 2016 04:00PM

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Comment author: roland 10 January 2016 02:56:24PM 4 points [-]

From a mere act of the imagination we cannot learn anything about the real world. To suppose that the resulting probability assignments have any real physical meaning is just another form of the mind projection fallacy. In practice, this diverts our attention to irrelevancies and away from the things that really matter (such as information about the real world that is not expressible in terms of any sampling distribution, or does not fit into the urn picture, but which is nevertheless highly cogent for the inferences we want to make). Usually, the price paid for this folly is missed opportunities; had we recognized that information, more accurate and/or more reliable inferences could have been made.

-- E T Jaynes Probability Theory the Logic of Science