= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
curi comments on Bayesian Epistemology vs Popper - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (226)
Bayesian epistemology doesn't create moral knowledge because it only functions when fed in observation data (or assumptions). I get a lot of conflicting statements here, but some people tell me they only care about prediction, they are instrumentalists, and that is what Bayes stuff is for, and they don't regard it as a bad thing that it doesn't address morality at all.
Now what you have in mind, I think, is that if you make a ton of assumptions you could then talk about morality using Bayes. Popperism doesn't require a bunch of arbitrary starting assumptions to create moral knowledge, it just can deal with it directly.
If I'm wrong, explain how you can deal with figuring out, e.g., what are good moral values to have (without assuming a utility function or something).
As I tried to say (and probably explained really poorly- sorry!), the LW consensus is that morality is not objective. Therefore, the idea of figuring out what good moral values would be is, according to moral non-realism, impossible: any decision about what a good moral value is must rely on your pre-existing values, if an objective morality is not out there to be discovered. Using this as a criticism of Bayesianism is sorta like criticizing thermodynamics because it claims it's impossible to exactly specify the position and velocity of each particle: not only is the criticism unrelated to the subject matter, but satisfying it would require the theory to do something that is to the best of our knowledge incorrect.