All of MathijsJ's Comments + Replies

Jaynes avoids P(A|B) for "probability of A given evidence B" and P(B) for "probability of B", preferring P(A|BX) and P(B|X) where X is one's background knowledge. This and the above leads naturally to the question of ~X: the situation in which one's "background knowledge" is false. Assume that background knowledge X is the conjunction of a finite number of propositions. ~X is true if any of these propositions is false. If we can factor X into YZ where Y is the portion we suspect of being false — that is, if we can isolate for testing a portion of those beliefs we previously treated as "background knowledge" — then we can ask about P(A|BYZ) and P(A|B·~Y·Z).

Thanks for the analysis, MathijsJ! It made perfect sense and resolved most of my objections to the article. I was willing to accept that we cannot reach absolute certainty by accumulating evidence, but I also came up with multiple logical statements that undeniably seemed to have probability 1. Reading your post, I realized that my examples were all tautologies, and that your suggestion to allow certainty only for tautologies resolved the discrepancy. The Wikipedia article timtyler linked to seems to support this: "Cromwell's rule [...] states that one should avoid using prior probabilities of 0 or 1, except when applied to statements that are logically true or false." This matches your analysis - you can only be certain of tautologies. Also, your discussion of models neatly resolves the distinction between, say, a mathematically-defined die (which can be certain to end up showing an integer between 1 and 6) and a real-world die (which cannot quite be known for sure to have exactly six stable states). ---------------------------------------- Eliezer makes his position pretty clear: "So I propose that it makes sense to say that 1 and 0 are not in the probabilities; just as negative and positive infinity, which do not obey the field axioms, are not in the real numbers." It's true - you cannot ever reach a probability of 1 if you start at 0.5 and accumulate evidence, just as you cannot reach infinity if you start at 0 and add integer values. And the inverse is true, too - you cannot accumulate evidence against a tautology and bring its probability down to anything less than 1. But this doesn't mean a probability of 1 is an incoherent concept or anything. Eliezer: if you're going to say that 0 and 1 are not probabilities, you need to come up with a new term for them. They haven't gone away completely just because we can't reach them. Edit a year and a half later: I agree with the article as written, partially as a result of reading How to Convince Me That 2 + 2