All of snewmark's Comments + Replies

Oh, I wasn't aware that they had to be Bayesian for that rule to apply, thanks for the help.

Either the parties must agree to disagree (which they could honestly do if they're not all Bayesians...

Could you elaborate on that? Sorry, I just don't get it.

3Lumifer
It's a hint at Aumann's theorem.

I'm not sure if this what eagain was alluding to, but this does seem advisable; Do not permit (continuous) debates of recognizably bad ideas.

I admit this is difficult to enforce, but stating that rule will, in my opinion, color the intended purpose of this website.

-1Lumifer
The word "bad" looks to be doing all the heavy lifting in here.

And I had to read past the end to realize that...

Upvoted entirely for using "begs the question" correctly.

Ha, did you really praise the proper use of an ancient expression in the midst of a definition debate?

(Sorry about posting this 4 years later, I just had to get that out.)

Sometimes even simple questions like 'where did the first humans come from?' turn out to have complicated answers

Of course it's not actually a simple question, it's really a broad inquiry. In fact it doesn't even need to have an answer and even when it does, it usually alters the question slightly... the hard part is asking the right questions not finding the answer.

(It just dawned on me that this was the whole point of The Question in A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, thanks for that.)

MarsColony_in10years: Yeah, thanks. Sorry about the nitpicking.

ChristianKl: I think an infinite number would allow you to rule out the possibility (of a black swan that is). I thought that the problem was simply that we could never get an infinite number of them, but then again: I'm not certain.

0ChristianKl
To the extend that the word infinitive makes sense, you can see an infinitive number of white swans without seeing a black swan.

And you notice, I haven't even started to think about the ethical side of the question...

I'm pretty sure the question itself revolves around ethics, as far as I can tell the question is: given these 2 choices, which would you consider, ethically speaking, the ideal option?

The police officer is PAID to do that. He isn't doing it for free out of the goodness of his heart like the superhero is.

Oh cool, so if I pay you will you let me kill you?

You know the only thing worse than arguing about politics, is arguing why one shouldn't argue about politics.

Seriously though, while this post is/was important, I still think there should have been a request to not debate politics in this post's comment section, because you know, explaining why it's bad to debate politics in science blogs apparently wasn't enough.

Feynman's claim in 1966 that "Nobody understands QM" thus inadvertently illustrates one of the other great truths, which is that nobody knows what nobody knows.

I don't think he was actually trying to say nobody understands quantum, I'm pretty sure he was actually saying (albeit in less words): "just because you don't understand quantum, does not mean that you are unintelligent, or that the theory is incorrect". I believe that as you pointed "nobody knows what nobody knows", implies that he wouldn't make such a statement wi... (read more)

So what if I'm a hypocrite? You're a hypocrite too!

...so the total value of a lingering doubt should go to zero if investigated forever.

Very well written, I just wanted to confirm something, I was under the impression that since nothing has 100% certainty, nothing can have a 0% uncertainty, you could get closer and closer, but you can never actually reach it. If I'm wrong or misunderstanding this I would appreciate it if someone would correct me, thanks.

0MarsColony_in10years
That's my understanding as well. I was trying to say that, if you were to formalize all this mathematically, and took the limit as number of Bayesian updates n went to infinity, uncertainty would go to zero. Since we don't have infinite time to do an infinite number of updates, in practice there is always some level of uncertainty > 0%.

I'm not sure if 'fragile' is the right word, removing one component might be devastating, but in my opinion, that more reflects on the importance of each piece, and not so much on the fragility of the actual system. The way I see it, it's something like a tower with 4 large beams for support, if one takes out a single piece, it would be worse than, say if one removed a piece from a tower with 25 smaller beams to support it.

But other than that, thank you very much for the informative article.