All of SoulAllnighter's Comments + Replies

I guess this is the wrong place for this comment but i don't know where else to put it and after reading the extensive threads on 9/11 below i felt this was a valid point. If someone objects to this being here i'll move it to somewhere more appropriate. It looks like i'm a bit out of date with the discussion anyway.

Firstly I should say i'm still very undecided on the matter. Iv'e heard a lot of convincing evidence for both sides of the story, and I know many intelligent people who's opinion i respect on both sides of the fence. I do however think that it... (read more)

I have to disagree with this interpretation. The whole point is that the frequency interpretation of probability can be a specific case of the Bayesian (probability = belief) interpretation, but not vice versa.

If I say I belief in the existence of aliens with 0.2 belief i think its non-intuitive and unrealistic that what im really saying is, "i think aliens exist in 20% of all plausible worlds". Apart from the difficulty in clearly defining 'plausible' the point of Bayesianism is that this simply represents my state of knowledge/belief.

3Kaj_Sotala
I find Bayesian probability to be meaningless unless you connect it to a pseudo-frequentist interpretation somehow. Sure, you can say "Bayesian probability measures my subjective belief in something", but in that case, what does having a 20% subjective belief in something actually mean, and how's it different from having an 80% subjective belief? You need some scheme of translating it from a meaningless number to an expectation, and all such translations (e.g. in terms of betting behavior) always end up being pseudo-frequentist somehow.

G'day LW Im an Aussie currently studying at the Australian National University in Canberra. My name is Sam and i should point out that the 'G'day' is just for fun, most Australians never use that phase and it kinda makes me cringe.

At at this very moment i'm trying to finish my thesis on the foundations of inductive reasoning, which i guess is pretty relevant to this community. A big part of my thesis is to translate a lot of very technical mathematics regarding Bayesianism and Sollomonoff induction into philosophical and intuitive explanations, so this wh... (read more)

2Wei Dai
Welcome to Less Wrong! I think you might be interested in these posts of mine, where I develop some standard and non-standard interpretations of probability theory. Let me know what you think. (BTW, I think you misspelled Solomonoff 's name?) * Probability Space & Aumann Agreement * What Are Probabilities, Anyway?