Stupid Questions February 2017

Erfeyah

This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.

Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.

To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.

Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.

To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.

That is good. But how would you assign the probability of 'everything you haven't thought of yet' in a problem? You would have to base it again on data; which takes us back to the same question. Data can of course be sufficient for fields that are advanced to a point of overwhelming clarity. But when we get into sufficiently complex subjects the rational approach would be to say that my 'everything I haven't thought of yet' prior is so large that the only rational answer is "I don't know". Would you agree?

"I don't know" means "I can't predict the outcome better than a dart throwing monkey". Doctors usually know more than that.

You seem to have a lot of black and white terms like "right hypothesis", "accepting explanations as truths" and "I don't know" in your thinking.

In the Bayesian perspective 0 and 1 aren't probabilities.

3moridinamael9y

Yes, you can't get away from data. And in fact it is often rational to put a dominant prior on "whatever the explanation is, it probably isn't one of the ones that I've managed to come up with". There's nothing magic about Bayes theorem, it can't create new information, but when properly used it helps avoid overconfidence and underconfidence.