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whowhowho comments on Reductionism - Less Wrong
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So, the introduction of "automated" to this discussion feels like a complete nonsequitor to me. Can you clarify why you introduce it?
If you have a "systematic" way of "producing" something, (JGWeissman) surely you can automate it.
Ah. OK, thanks for clarifying.
I could call a procedure "systematic" even if one of the steps used a human's System 1 as an oracle, in which case it'd be hard to automate that as per Moravec's paradox.
I would not call such a procedure systematic. Who would? Here's a system for success as an author: first have a brilliant idea...it reads like a joke, doesn't it?
I wasn't thinking of something that extreme; more like the kind of tasks people do on Mechanical Turk.
Is there anything non systematic by that definition? In what way does it promote Bayesianism to call it systematic?
Well, I have no idea if it "promotes Bayesianism" or not, but when someone talks to me about a systematic approach to doing something in normal conversation, I understand it to be as opposed to a scattershot/intuitive approach.
For example, if I want to test a piece of software, I can make a list of all the integration points and inputs and key use cases and build a matrix of those lists and build test cases for each cell in that matrix, or I can just construct a bunch of test cases as they occur to me. The former approach is more systematic, even if I can't necessarily automate the test cases.
I realize that your understanding of "systematic" is different from this... if I've understood you, if I can't automate the test cases then this approach is not systematic on your account.
Can there be a scattershot or intuitive scientific method?
Well, first of all, we should probably clarify that the original claim was that Bayesian rationality was a systematic way of producing good theories, and therefore presumably was meant to contrast with scattershot or intuitive ways of producing good theories, rather than to contrast with a scattershot or intuitive scientific method... just in case any of our readers lost track of the original question.
But to answer your question... I wouldn't think so, in that an important part of what X needs to have before I'm willing to call X a scientific method is a systematic way of validating and replicating results.
That said, I would say it's possible for a scientific method to embed a scattershot or intuitive approach to producing theories. Indeed, the history of the scientific method as applied by humans has done this pretty ubiquitously.
That just makes matters worse. Bayes might systematically allow you judge the relative goodness of various theories, once they have been produced,, but it doesn't help at all in producing them. You can't just crank the handle on Bayes and get relativity
See TheOtherDave.
See E.T. Jaynes calling certain frequentist techniques “ad-hockeries”. EDIT: BTW, I didn't have Bayesianism in mind when I replied to this ancestor -- I should stop replying to comments without reading their ancestors first.