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.

EGarrett comments on Open Thread for February 11 - 17 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: Coscott 11 February 2014 06:08PM

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

Comments (325)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: EGarrett 13 February 2014 03:08:25AM 1 point [-]

I'm looking into Bayesian Reasoning and trying to get a basic handle on it and how it differs from traditional thinking. When I read about how it (apparently) takes into account various explanations for observed things once they are observed, I was immediately reminded of Richard Feynman's opinion of Flying Saucers. Is Feynman giving an example of proper Bayesian thinking here?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLaRXYai19A

Comment author: mcoram 14 February 2014 04:17:10AM 1 point [-]

It's certainly in the right spirit. He's reasoning backwards in the same way Bayesian reasoning does: here's what I see; here's what I know about possible mechanisms for how that could be observed and their prior probabilities; so here what I think is most likely to be really going on.