Please reply to this comment if you intend to participate, and are willing and able to free up a few hours per week or fortnight to work through the suggested reading or exercises.

Please indicate where you live, if you would be willing to have some discussion IRL. My intent is to facilitate an online discussion here on LW but face-to-face would be a nice complement, in locations where enough participants live.

(You need not check in again here if you have already done so in the previous discussion thread, but you can do so if you want to add details such as your location.)

Feedback sought: is this too short? Too long? Is the intent clear? What if anything is missing?

Less Wrong Book Club and Study Group

(This is a draft that I propose posting to the top level, with such improvements as will be offered, unless feedback suggests it is likely not to achieve its purposes. Also reply if you would be willing to co-facilitate: I'm willing to do so but backup would be nice.)

Do you want to become stronger in the way of Bayes? This post is intended for people whose understanding of Bayesian probability theory is currently between levels 0 and 1, and who are interested in developing deeper knowledge through deliberate practice.

Our intention is to form a self-study group composed of peers, working with the assistance of a facilitator - but not necessarily of a teacher or of an expert in the topic. Some students may be somewhat more advanced along the path, and able to offer assistance to others.

Our first text will be E.T. Jayne's Probability Theory: The Logic of Science, which can be found in PDF form (in a slightly less polished version than the book edition) here or here.

We will work through the text in sections, at a pace allowing thorough understanding: expect one new section every week, maybe every other week. A brief summary of the currently discussed section will be published as an update to this post, and simultaneously a comment will open the discussion with a few questions, or the statement of an exercise. Please use ROT13 whenever appropriate in your replies.

A first comment below collects intentions to participate. Please reply to this comment only if you are genuinely interested in gaining a better understanding of Bayesian probability and willing to commit to spend a few hours per week reading through the section assigned or doing the exercises. A few days from now the first section will be posted.

My name is Taiyo Inoue. I am a 32, male, father of a 1 year old son, married, and a math professor. I enjoy playing the acoustic guitar (American primitive fingerpicking), playing games, and soaking up the non-poisonous bits of the internet.

I went through 12 years of math study without ever really learning that probability theory is the ultimate applied math. I played poker for a bit during the easy money boom for fun and hit on basic probability theory which the 12 year old me could have understood, but I was ignorant of the Bayesian framework for epistemology until I was 30 years old. This really annoys me.

I blame my education for leaving me ignorant about something so fundamental, but mostly I blame myself for not trying harder to learn about fundamentals on my own.

This site is really good for remedying that second bit. I have a goal to help fix the first bit -- I think we call it "raising the sanity waterline".

As a father, I also want to teach my son so he doesn't have the same regret and annoyance at my age.

Hi.

Any comments I've made have been in the last few months. Ive been lurking this site since its inception.

Perhaps my consciousness is indecomposable.

There is a big difference between decomposing consciousness into its constituent fragments, vs. simply identifying the degrees of freedom in your conscious experience. Drilling down into your introspection and identifying the smallest specks of experience which you can think of as being details of your consciousness is doing the latter. You can go about modifying any of these tiny details more or less independently, but your consciousness is still a self-contained object.

It's only after you isolate a single electron that you can talk about what its conscious experience would look and feel like.

I'd like to offer what I think might be objections to this post. When I imagine myself as a non-reductionist and non-materialist reading this post (I am, in fact, neither of these things), I believe I find myself unconvinced by this thought experiment. I suppose I'm not sure convincing this hypothetical me is the goal... nonetheless here are my hypothetical objections:

1. When I introspect on my thought processes, I am using my mind. I might imagine that I can isolate a "specks of consciousness" just as you ask me to do, but this is a fact about my state of mind which does not necessarily correlate with reality. Perhaps my consciousness is indecomposable. It feels that way to me. What it seems like you are asking me to do in this thought experiment is build a model of consciousness in which consciousness is already similar to matter in that it is decomposable. This seems like question begging! I need more evidence that shows that such reductionism is actually possible.

2. In any case, suppose that I put my reductionist hat on, and examine my model of decomposable consciousness. Calling infinitesimal specks of my consciousness electrons isn't helpful to me. It also feels like question begging since it seems to assume that my consciousness is made of the same stuff as ordinary matter. If you want to call these specks of mind electrons, feel free. But labeling something is a fact about maps, not about the territory. I need evidence of this which speaks directly about the phenomenon of consciousness.

3. My perceptions or feelings may sometimes lead me astray, but often times they work really well! For example, when I perceive a rock flying at my face, I do much better when I trust my instincts and feelings than when I don't. How can I tell that my feelings that there is something extraphysical about my consciousness or that the only right way to think about consciousness is by taking a holistic approach are, in fact, wrong?

There is a sign problem when iev(A,B) is defined. You mention that you can get the mutual information of A and B by taking -log_2 of probabilistic evidence pev(A,B) = P(AB) / [P(A)P(B)], but this creates an extra negative sign:

-log2(pev(A,B)) = -log2[P(AB) / [P(A)P(B)]] = -[ log2(P(AB)) - [log2(P(A)) + log2(P(B))] ] = -log2(P(AB)) + log2(P(A)) + log2(P(B)) = inf(AB) - inf(A) - inf(B).

I donated 100 USD to the general fund.

I am a lurker -- always taking and never giving. This might change, but perhaps not. In any case, this opportunity is an effective way for me to give back to a community that has given me so much. Thank you.