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Yes, that's the letter!
It might help if you told us which of the thousands of varieties of Bayesianism you have in mind with your question. (I would link to I.J. Good's letter on the 46656 Varieties of Bayesians, but the best I could come up with was the citation in Google Scholar, which does not make the actual text available.)
In terms of pure (or mostly pure) criticisms of frequentist interpretations of probability, you might look at two papers by Alan Hajek: fifteen arguments against finite frequentism and fifteen arguments against hypothetical frequentism.
In terms of Bayesian statistics, you might take a look at a couple of papers by Dennis Lindley: an older paper on The Present Position in Bayesian Statistics and a newer one on The Philosophy of Statistics.
Lindley gives a personalist Bayesian account. If you want "objective Bayes," you might take a look at this paper by James Berger. (The link actually has a bunch of papers, some of them discussing Berger's paper, which is the first in the set.)
You might also find Bradley Efron's paper Why Isn't Everyone a Bayesian? useful. And on that note, I'll just say that the presupposition of your question (that Bayesianism is straightforwardly superior to frequentism in all or most all cases) is more fraught than you might think.
It's also conceivable that with his compelling story of kidney failure with his life saved by transplantation, Hitler gets admitted to art school, creating beautiful landscape paintings for the rest of his life. At the same time, the person who cures cancer may also accidentally create a virus that destroys every single living cell on earth within one week after its accidental release into the environment. The only person surviving would be a brain emulation prototype which copies itself, rebuilding human society such that nobody dies or feels pain anymore.
Oh, the under-specification! ;)
Seems to me that curing cancer swamps out everything else in the story. Supposing that World War 2 was entirely down to Hitler, the casualties came to about 60-80 million.* By comparison, back of the envelope calculations suggest that around 1.7 million people die from cancer each year in the U.S., E.U., and Japan taken together. See the CDC numbers and the Destatis numbers (via Google's public data explorer) for the numbers that I used to form a baseline for the 1.7 million figure.
That means that within a generation or two, the cancer guy would have saved as many lives (to speak with the vulgar) as the Hitler guy would have killed. Plus, the cancer guy would have improved quality of life for a lot more people than that. Maybe we have to go another couple of generations to balance life years if the Hitler casualties are all young and the cancer savings are all old. But under the assumption that a solution to cancer is very unlikely without the cancer guy, the right decision seems clearly to be to steer the trolley left.
* Things get more complicated if we suppose that the Hitler guy will bring about a new world war and attempted genocide, which might involve full-on nuclear war, rather than a sort of repeat of real-Hitler's consequences. I am choosing to understand the Hitler guy as being responsible for 60 or 80 million deaths -- or make the number a bit larger, like 100 million, if you like.
I just stumbled into this discussion after reading an article about why mathematicians and scientists dislike traditional, Socratic philosophy, and my mindset is fresh off that article.
It was a fantastic read, but the underlying theme that I feel is relevant to this discussion is this:
Socratic philosophy treats logical axioms as "self-evident truths" (i.e. I think, therefore I am).
Mathematics treats logical axioms as "propositions", and uses logic to see where those propositions lead (i.e. if you have a line and a point, the number/amount of lines that you can draw through the point that's parallel to the original line determines what type of geometry you are working with (multidimensional, spherical, or flat-plane geometry)).
Scientists treat logical axioms as "hypotheses", and logical "conclusions" as testable statements that can determine whether those axioms are true or not (i.e. if this weird system known as "quantum mechanics" were true, then we would see an interference pattern when shooting electrons through a screen with 2 slits).
So I guess the point that we should be making is this: which philosophical approach towards logic should we take to study ethics? I believe Wei_Lai would say that the first approach, treating ethical axioms as "self-evident truths" is problematic due to the fact that a lot of hypothetical situations (like my example before) can create a lot of contradictions between various ethical axioms (i.e. choosing between telling a lie and letting terrorists blow up the planet).
Interesting piece. I was a bit bemused by this, though:
In fact Plato wrote to Archimedes, scolding him about messing around with real levers and ropes when any gentleman would have stayed in his study or possibly, in Archimedes’ case, his bath.
Problematically for the story, Plato died around 347 BCE, and Archimedes wasn't born until 287 BCE -- sixty years later.
Gandhi and Marting Luther King, Jr. are the headliners, as usual. Both used pacificism as a tool against regimes that, in the end, needed to think of themselves as decent people, and that had to bow to political pressure both at home and abroad. There's far more examples, though, that people don't think about - when you're looking for social change in the modern first world, non-violence is the default. Women's rights were secured without violence. Black civil rights in America were gained through non-violent activists like King and through the courts - there were violence groups like the Black Panthers, but in the end King's approach worked and violence... just didn't. Gay rights might be another example, although gays are marginalized, but not powerless, since they can show up anywhere - still, the gay rights movement has been well organized, never used violence, and has brought the first world to the point where full equality for homosexuals seems inevitable in about a generation.
I'm not sure what you count as violence, but if you look at the history of the suffrage movement in Britain, you will find that while the movement started out as non-violent, it escalated to include campaigns of window-breaking, arson, and other destruction of property. (Women were also involved in many violent confrontations with police, but it looks like the police always initiated the violence. To what degree women responded in kind and whether that would make their movement violent is unclear to me.) The historians usually describe the vandalism campaigns as violent, militarism, or both, though maybe you meant to restrict attention to violence against persons. Of course, the women agitating for the vote suffered much more violence than they inflicted.
When a certain episode of Pokemon contained contained a pattern of red and blue flashes capable of inducing epilepsy, 685 children were taken to hospitals, most of whom had seen the pattern not on the original Pokemon episode but on news reports showing the episode which had induced epilepsy.
At the very least, this needs a citation or two, since the following sources cast doubt on the story as presented:
And CSI's account, which includes the following:
At about 6:51, the flashing lights filled the screens. By 7:30, according to the Fire-Defense agency, 618 children had been taken to hospitals complaining of various symptoms.
News of the attacks shot through Japan, and it was the subject of media reports later that evening. During the coverage, several stations replayed the flashing sequence, whereupon even more children fell ill and sought medical attention. The number affected by this “second wave” is unknown.
And then goes on to argue that the large number of cases was due to mass hysteria.
Do you have worked out numbers (in terms of community participation, support dollars, increased real-world violence, etc.) comparing the effect of having the censorship policy and the effect of allowing discussions that would be censored by the proposed policy? The request for "Consequences we haven't considered" is hard to meet until we know with sufficient detail what exactly you have considered.
My gut thinks it is unlikely that having a censorship policy has a smaller negative public relations effect than having occasional discussions that violate the proposed policy. I know that I am personally much less okay with the proposed censorship policy than with having occasional posts and comments on LW that would violate the proposed policy.
What would have to be true in order for increased gun control to mean fewer killings?
Why do mass murders happen? They do not happen by accident. Humans are optimizers, albeit flawed ones; we seek means to accomplish our goals. Once a human decides that killing people is a goal (terminal or instrumental), if they don't change their mind, some folks are likely to get killed. Mass murders such as those at Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, or Columbine are premeditated — goal-directed activity, not undirected acts of chaos. The killers decided they wanted to kill, chose what sort of targets to pursue, evaluated what weapons were available to them, and selected a course of action to meet their goals.
In order for gun control to mean fewer killings, it would have to accomplish something like one of the following:
- Make people less likely to decide to kill, perhaps by reducing priming and availability-to-mind of the concept of killing.
- Reduce the availability of effective means to kill, so that an intended killer is unable to find a way to do the deed.
- Cause delay, for instance by waiting periods, so that the would-be killer loses their intention to kill.
2 seems to be out. In situations where guns are not readily available, people who have decided to kill choose other means, such as poison, bombs, or knives. The same is true when guns are insufficient to accomplish the intended destruction, as in the Oklahoma City bombing. Bombs are harder to use (the Columbine killers' improvised ones did not work) and harder to practice using. Effective poisons for mass murder aren't easy to come by for most people. But humans are not stupid even when pursuing bad goals; they choose guns when guns are available and effective, and not when they are not.
3 may indeed work. It's reasonable to suspect that waiting periods delay people who previously owned no guns from buying them for immediate murderous use, and delay them long enough that the intention has passed. School shooters seem to plan further in advance than that; but in the school shooting I know the most about — Wayne Lo's 1992 murders at Simon's Rock College, 20 years to the day before Sandy Hook — if the shooter had been delayed by a few days, the college would have been on winter break.
How about 1? Plenty of folks have commented on "gun culture". The presence of weapons may make it more likely that a person think that the solution to their problems is to kill someone; as a matter of availability heuristic. How could we find out? How could we distinguish "having guns around makes it more likely you'll decide to kill someone" from "people who are more likely to decide to kill are also more likely to have guns around"?
What is the evidence that 2 is out? Suppose there are five available effective means to some end. If I take away one of them, doesn't that reduce the availability of effective means to that end? Is the idea supposed to be that the various means are all so widely available that overall availability of means to the relevant end is not affected by eliminating (or greatly reducing) availability of one of them? Seems contentious to me. Moreover, what you say after the claim that 2 is out seems rather to support the claim that 2 is basically correct: poison, bombs, and knives are either practically less effective for one reason or another (hard to use, hard to practice, less destructive -- in the case of knives) or practically less available for one reason or another (poisons not widely available).
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That pdf is a scan of chapters 3 and 4 of I. J. Good's book, Good Thinking: The Foundations of Probability and Its Applications (free pdf) (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). Chapter 3, '46656 varieties of Bayesians', reprints a letter in American Statistician (December, 1971), vol. 25, pp. 62-63. This is indeed the letter which JonathanLivengood cited in his comment above.
Wow! Thanks for the Good Thinking link. Now I won't have to scan it myself.