Open Thread, September, 2010-- part 2

NancyLebovitz

This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.

I recently mentioned Dempster-Shafer evidentiary theory another thread. I admit, I was surprised to get no replies to that comment.

Is there any interest in a top-level post introducing DST? Bayesianism seems to be cited as a god of reasoning around here, but DST is strictly more powerful, since setting uncertainty to 0 in all DST formulas results in answers identical to what Bayesian probability would give. I would like to introduce Dempster-Shafer here, but only if the audience will find it worthwhile.

3Will_Newsome16y

I would very much like an introductory post. Hopefully LW's best statisticians would reply and a good discussion would get going. As far as human epistemic rationality is concerned, though, does it ever help to try to 'move in harmony with the DST' the way it seems to help when people try to 'move in harmony with the Bayes' by e.g. making sure to take into account prior probabilities or the like? Are there any qualitative applications of DST to one's beliefs that are more powerful or more elegant than naive Bayesian heuristics? Also, it is just a confusion to ask what the equivalent of Bayesian networks are for DST? I'm definitely not a statistician but the application of verbalized statistical heuristics has helped me a lot in the past. It'd be cool if you could cover these questions in your post, but if not I still think you should write it. Pleaaaaaase.

3gwern16y

I'd like to read about it, but less about the details than why we should prefer it to Bayesianism. For example, how would proponents deal with Cox's theorem?

5

Open Thread, September, 2010-- part 2

5

5

5

Open Thread, September, 2010-- part 2

5

5