James Bach, your point and EY's are not incompatible : it is a given that what you care about and give importance to is subjective and irrational, however having chosen what outcomes you care about, your best road to achieving them must be Bayesian.... perhaps. My problem with this whole Bayesian kick is that it reminds me of putting three masts and a full set of square-rigged sails on what is basically a canoe : the masts and sails are the Bayesian edifice, the canoe is our useful knowledge in any given real life situation.

Risk aversion, and the degree to which it is felt, is a personality trait with high variance between individuals and over the lifespan. To ignore it in a utility calculation would be absurd. Maurice Allais should have listened to his homonym Alphonse Allais (no apparent relation), humorist and theoretician of the absurd, who famously remarked "La logique mène à tout à condition d'en sortir". Logic leads to everything, on condition it don't box you in.

Just to respond to the theme that 'right wing' is a meaningless label, not so. It originally arose from the seating arrangements in the French Assembly, where the right wing were the monarchists. Hence right wing became generally accepted as a label for the authoritarian defence of a monarchic, aristocratic, or oligarchic power structure. As these power structure tended to be the ones in place, you have the confusion with Conservatism (e.g. Torys). By a further semantic slide, it came, for some, to mean any authoritarian power structure with power concentrated in the hands of the few, hence the lumping together of the various 20thC dictatorships as right wing. For those who conceive the power of 'Big Business' to be oligarchic and oppressive, any political program favourising the large corporations is right wing. One source of confusion between 'right wing' and Libertarianism comes from the disingenuous protests that any politics which limit the power of the corporate world are 'attacking free enterprise' thus, attacking individual freedom. This is compounded by the myths attached to the notion of private property, where 'mine' as in 'my log cabin and my boots' is extended to 'my corporation over which I have Regalian powers' simply because I invested some bucks in it 30 years ago. Libertarianism as described here seems to be a peculiarly American movement, which would map somewhat but not completely to the European anarchists. Finally, of course individual politics are multi-dimensional. However, all countries which aren't dictatorships seem to end up with two party systems, so all those dimensions have to projected down, hopefully on a 'best-fit' basis, to the single axis most appropriate to the country in question.

Charlie (Colorado), I'd appreciate your thoughts on the difference between 'hard core libertarian' and 'right wing'. For me they map to pretty much the same territory, obviously not for you.

When one got past pre-adolescence, one realised that Heinlein's writing skills, such as they were, were in the service of a political philosophy somewhat to the right of Attila the Hun. Whatever floats your boat.

I just saw an incredibly beautiful sunset. I also see the beauty in some of EY's stuff. Does that mean the sunset was Bayesian, or indeed subject to underlying lawfulness ? No, it only means my enhanced primate brain has a tendency to see beauty in certain things. Not that there is any more epistemic significance in a sunset than there is in a theorem.

OK thanks, nice intuition pump.

"only because our fundamental theory tells us quite definitely that different versions of us will see different results".

EY, on what do you base your 'quite definitely' ? David Lewis ?

Thanks for the beauty, it feels good. Some thinking out loud. I can't help but feel that the key is in the successive layers of maps and territories : maths is (or contains) the map of which physics is the territory, physics is the map of which 'the real world' is the territory, 'the real world' is the map our brains create from the sensory input concerning the territory which is the 'play of energies' out there, while that in itself is another map. Antony Garrett Lisi's proposal, as an example, would be the most elegant meta-map yet. What these maps have in commmon is : being created by the human brain, a wet lump of nervous tissue comprising ad-hoc purpose specific modules. It has specific ways of making maps, so small wonder all these layers of maps are coherent. Now if the 'mathematics' layer of maps has unforeseen and self-consistent properties, it could be just a manifestation of the nature of our map-making modules : they are rules driven. So, is the Universe a geometric figure corresponding to a Lie E8 group, or does that just happen to be the way the human brain is built to interpret things ?

The nature of 0 & 1 as limit cases seem to be fascinating for the theorists. However, in terms of 'Overcoming Bias', shouldn't we be looking at more mundane conceptions of probability ? EY's posts have drawn attention to the idea that the amount of information needed to add additional cetainty on a proposition increases exponentially while the probability increases linearly. This says that in utilitarian terms, not many situations will warrant chasing the additional information above 99.9% certainty (outside technical implementations in nuclear physics, rocket science or whatever). 99.9% as a number is taken out of a hat. In human terms, when we say 'I'm 99.9% sure that 2+2 always =4', where not talking about 1000 equivalent statements. We're talking about one statement, with a spatial representation of what '100% sure' means with respect to that statement, and 0.1% of that spatial representation allowed for 'niggling doubts', of the sort : what have I forgotten ? What don't I know ? What is inconceivable for me ? The interesting question for 'overcoming bias' is : how do we make that tradeoff between seeking additional information on the one hand and accepting a limited degree of certainty on the other ? As an example (cf. the Evil Lords of the Matrix), considering whether our minds are being controlled by magic mushrooms from Alpha Pictoris may someday increase the 'niggling doubt' range from 0.1% to 5%, but the evidence would have to be shoved in our faces pretty hard first.