You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Oscar_Cunningham comments on In Defense of Objective Bayesianism: MaxEnt Puzzle. - Less Wrong Discussion

6 Post author: Larks 06 January 2011 12:56AM

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

Article Navigation

Comments (11)
Tags: bayes academia entropy question puzzle

Comments (11)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Oscar_Cunningham 06 January 2011 06:39:05PM 2 points [-]

So, if asked to assign a probability to an arbitrary A, you’d say p = 0.5. But if you were given evidence in the form of some constraints on p, say that p ≥ 0.8, you’d set p = 0.8, as that was the new entropy-maximising level. Constraints are restricted to Affine constraints. I found this somewhat counter-intuitive already, but I do follow what he means.

This bit doesn't make sense either, what kind of evidence imposes a condition on your personal (subjective) probability?

Comment author: endoself 06 January 2011 08:29:05PM 1 point [-]

A subjective probability is not arbitrary. It is the most accurate estimate possible given the evidence to the subject. See http://lesswrong.com/lw/s6/probability_is_subjectively_objective .

Comment author: Oscar_Cunningham 06 January 2011 10:35:55PM 1 point [-]

I think you're misunderstanding me, but I can't think of a way to better phrase what I said, sorry.

Maybe if I put it thus: I can't think of a situation where some evidence E will make my posterior probability P(A|E) greater than 0.8 regardless of my prior P(A).

Comment author: endoself 06 January 2011 11:12:42PM -1 points [-]

Yeah, re-reading the quote, I see what you mean. He seems to have confused a frequency with a probability distribution over possible values of the frequency. Maybe that's why he made the other error that the post discusses.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit