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jsteinhardt comments on I'm becoming intolerant. Help. - Less Wrong Discussion
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What does it mean to "use probability theory to deal with your beliefs"? How do you use probability, and how does it change your conclusions?
This question might be worth a discussion post. I constantly use visuospatial and kinesthetic qualia when thinking, which to a non-negligible extent draw on intuitions begotten from understanding the basic concepts of algorithmic probability theory and its relations---information theory, probability theory, computer science, and statistical mechanics. That said, I almost never pull out pen and paper, and when I do pull out pen and paper it's to help structure my Fermi calculations, not to plug numbers into Bayes' theorem. It seems obvious to me both that there are large benefits to having Bayes-influenced intuitions firing all the time and also that there are few benefits of even remembering how to actually write out Bayes' theorem.
Edited to separate the following trivial factoid from above less trivial factoids: (Formal use of Bayes is pretty popular among---and abused by---Christian apologists. User:lukeprog would know more about that though.)
This doesn't seem to belong here. My guess is that you're just inserting a fact for general knowledge because you found it interesting, but it looks like an argument of the form "X does Y, X tends to exhibit low levels of rationality, so don't do Y", which is fallacious. I might remove it for potential mind-killing potential.
I praise your right view, and will edit my comment accordingly.
I would be interested in reading such a post (it seems like it might even be worth a top-level post depending on how much you have to say).
Could you give an example of using visuospatial and kinesthetic qualia when thinking?
Long-winded reply: I think it's not uncommon for folk to have kinestheticly-experienced conceptual aesthetics or decision-making processes. "That doesn't feel quite right" is commonly heard, as is the somewhat-ambiguous "Sorry, I just don't feel like going out tonight". Anyhow, others' apparent confidence in seemingly inelegant ontologies very distincly activates a lot of my thinking qualia. For example, if I hear a person resignedly accepting a uniform prior over vaguely defined objects in the mathematical universe hypothesis. The really fundamental feeling there is that it's just doesn't fit... I picture it in my head as an ocean of improper prior-ness flooding the Earth because some stupid primordial being didn't have enough philosophical aesthetics to realize that the mathematics shouldn't look like that, objectively speaking. And it feels... it just feels wrong. Often an idea or a hypotheses feels grinding, and sometimes it feels awkward, but most of the time things just feel not-right, inharmonious, off-kilter, dukkha. Sorry, very little sleep this week, not particularly coherent.
Edit: Not sure if this matters at all, but I think that I wouldn't be able to do clear timeful/timeless reasoning if I didn't have access to those intuitions. I also doubt that I could grok the concepts of statistical mechanics. That said, I really don't understand things like algebra or geometry... it must be something to do with implicit-movement, static things just don't work. (Edit: Mixtures and measures, logarithms, symmetric limits, proportionality, physical dimensionality, raw stuff of creation, creation self-similarity, causal fluid, causal structure... it's like crack.) I think that's why I love ambient/timeless control so much, it lets me think about Platonic objects using my flow-structure intuitions, which is cool 'cuz the Forms are so metaphysically appealing. I'm getting an fMRI soon and doing a whole bunch of cognitive tests soon, maybe that'll give a hint.