I don't understand why you're getting downvoted. Those were great links, and indeed relevant. I appreciated them.

Feyerabend's counterinduction and Bayesianism. Has anyone here thought about how these two views of science bear on each other?

Belief & double-blind randomized control group studies: response to IlyaShpitser

In a previous thread IlyaShpitser said >According to your blog, you don't believe in RCTs, right? What do you believe in?

This is part of the problem I'm trying to address. Belief/non-belief are inappropriate locutions to use in terms not only of the double-blind randomized control group method (DBRCGM), but of models and methods of science in general. "Belief in" a any scientific method is not even remotely relevant to science or the philosophy of science. Also, I did not say that the DBRCGM is entirely useless. All I'm really saying is it can be improved upon. Furthermore, what I "believe in" is almost entirely irrelevant to my appreciation of Bayesiansim and other forms of scientific fallibilistic flexibility. When we "believe in" something, we allay our curiosity and create unnecessary obstacles for the mind changes Bayesianism and fallibilistic flexibility encourage us to practice.

Do you believe the nutritional etiology of scurvy?

This is a good one. I definitely sympathize with Eliezer's point that Bayesian probability theory is only part of the solution. e.g., in philosophy of science, the deductive-nomological account of scientific explanation is being displaced by a mechanistic view of explanation. In this context, a mechanism is an organization of parts which is responsible for some phenomena. This change is driven by the inapplicability of D-N to certain areas of science, especially the biomedical sciences, where matters are more complex and we can't really deduce conclusions from universal laws; instead, people are treating law-like regularity as phenomena to be explained by appeal to the organized interactions of underlying parts.

e.g., Instead of explaining, "You display symptoms Y; All people with symptoms Y have disease X; Therefore, you have disease X," mechanists explain by positing a mechanism, the functioning of which constitutes the phenomena to be explained. This seems to me to be intimately related to Eliezer's "reduce-to-algorithm" stance; and that an appeal to reduce abstract beliefs to physical mechanisms seems to be a pretty good way to generalize his stance here. In addition, certain mechanistic philosophers have done work to connect mechanisms and mechanistic explanation with Bayesian probability, and with Pearl's work on Bayesian networks and causality. Jon Williamson at Kent has my favorite account: he uses Recursive Bayesian Networks to model this sort of mechanistic thinking quantitatively.

If you look at the wikipedia page that describes fallibilism, the word probability doesn't directly appear. In the main body of the article.

People like Pyrrho were practicing fallibilism long before the kind of math that you need to think about probabilities that you can multiple with each other got invented.

What are the differences and similarities between fallibilism and Bayesianism?

Eliezer_Yudkowsky (EY) said (above):

Let me see if I understand your thesis. You think we shouldn't anthropomorphize people?" -- Sidney Morgenbesser to B. F. Skinner

• As far as I've I can tell, this never happened.
• Perhaps your understanding of "anthropomorphic" is too narrow?

EY said (above):

Behaviorism was the doctrine that it was unscientific for a psychologist to ascribe emotions, beliefs, thoughts, to a human being.

This is the basic myth. Skinner fought very hard to demonstrate that this was a gross mischaracterization of behaviorism.

EY said (above):

But for the behaviorists to react to the sins of Freudian psychoanalysis and substance dualism, by saying that the subject matter of empathic inference did not exist... Which behaviorist? Where? When?

Added: I found it difficult to track down primary source material online, but behaviorism-as-denial-of-mental does not seem to be a straw depiction. I was able to track down at least one major behaviorist (J.B. Watson, founder of behaviorism) saying outright "There is no mind."

This should make plain why Watson was never behaviorist poster boy material. I wouldn't even call him a "major" behaviorist.

Mysticism isn't a topic that LW has paid any attention to.

Meditation has received some attention here, though I can't think of other sorts of mysticism. Perhaps Crowley's writings.