LESSWRONG
LW

All of Ron_Fern's Comments + Replies

An Intuitive Explanation of Solomonoff Induction
Ron_Fern00

I am confused, I thought we were to weight hypotheses by 2^-(kolmogorov(H)) not 2^-length(H). Am I missing something?

Reply
0thomblake
Yes, length there is short for "minimum message length" or in other words Kolmogorov complexity.
(Subjective Bayesianism vs. Frequentism) VS. Formalism
Ron_Fern30

I'm pretty sure almost all of freqeuntist methods are derivable as from bayes, or close approximations of bayes. Do they have any tool which is radically un-bayesian?

Reply
4jsteinhardt
See paulfchristiano's examples elsewhere in this thread. Another example would be support vector machines, which work really well in practice but aren't Bayesian (although it's possible that they are actually Bayesian and I just can't figure out what prior they correspond to). There are also neural networks, which are sort of Bayesian but (I think?) not really. I'm not actually that familiar with neural nets (or SVMs for that matter) so I could just be wrong. ETA: It is the case that every non-dominated decision procedure is either a Bayesian procedure or the limit of Bayesian procedures (which I think could alternately be thought of as a Bayesian procedure with a potentially improper prior). So in that sense, for any frequentist procedure that is not Bayesian, there is another procedure that gets higher expected utility in all possible worlds, and is therefore strictly better. The only problem is that this is again an abstract statement about decision procedures, and doesn't take into account the computational difficulty of actually finding the better procedure.
0[anonymous]
That is my understanding, too. Frequentists claim not to have priors, but in fact they just use uninformative priors implicitly. In a more fundamental sense, if they genuinely had no priors then they would be unable even to interpret the results of an experiment.
(Subjective Bayesianism vs. Frequentism) VS. Formalism
Ron_Fern20

I think the interpretation of probability and what methods to use for inference are two separate debates. There was a really good discussion post on this a while back.

I completely agree with this. It seems to me that we should completely throw away the question of what probability is, and look at which form of inference is optimal.

Reply
Let's Make an Open Problems Page
Ron_Fern00

yea, that's just a wiki entry. And the problems there are much more general than the sort of thing i am imagining. I'm thinking things like, interpretations of dutch book arguments, solutions to grue, optimizing problems, newcomb problems, open decision theory problems, and the like.

Reply
(Subjective Bayesianism vs. Frequentism) VS. Formalism
Ron_Fern50

Why can't a frequentist say: "Bayesians are conflating probability with subjective degree of belief." ? They were here first after all.

Probability does model frequency, and it does model subjective degree of believe, and this is not a contradiction. Using the copula is the problem, obviously: if subjective degree of believe is not frequency, and probability is frequency, then probability is not subjective degree of belief. Analogously, if subjective degree of believe is not frequency, and probability is subjective degree of belief, then probabil... (read more)

Reply
2[anonymous]
.
Welcome to Less Wrong! (2010-2011)
Ron_Fern00

Narrowing my interests is probably not an option. The fact that I can practically work on anything and still be a philosopher is one of the things that appeals to me about the field, but maybe that has something to do with why it so rarely done competently :/ My only other option is to work my butt off, but I know that to be a generalist and contribute takes lots of work. I do specialize in what I like to call algorithmic philosophy, and philosophy of mathematics, but that is only because I think they are of great import to my other fields of interest.

Reply
0[anonymous]
When I was your age (and how much I rue the saying of this) I also felt this way. I hope it works out better for you than it did for me.
Welcome to Less Wrong! (2010-2011)
Ron_Fern00

So what if anything is the standard lesswrong approach to Nelson Goodman's grue problem? If there is any paradox I could imagine someone posing against LW, I would imagine it would be the Grue problem.

(damn down voters edit): Not that I think it would pose any real threat. Just curious, I'm sure LW has a brilliant solution. And if not it can def be made by assembling the bits of other posts. I would really like to know why this got down voted.

Reply
2KPier
There's a fair bit of discussion here, but I wouldn't say it's the standard approach to the problem. If you haven't read Occam's Razor or some of the stuff on hypothesis complexity, reading that might help.
Welcome to Less Wrong! (2010-2011)
Ron_Fern00

"Minorfalsology" is totally the best word for it.

Reply
Welcome to Less Wrong! (2010-2011)
Ron_Fern10

Being anti-philosophy is something philosophy needs. Not in a boring, the field is dead Rorty sense. In a, these are scientific questions with definite right and wrong answers, kind of way.

I don't think anyone is ever really anti-philosophy; perhaps my imagination is so daft that I can't imagine someone with different tastes. I think philosophy has really frustrated a lot of truth seekers because it was being done poorly. Even in analytic philosophy, only ever so rarely does a tool from analytic philosophy come about that could not be compared to using a ... (read more)

Reply
2steven0461
It would be badderass in a dead language. "Minorifalsianism" or something.
Conservation of Expected Evidence
Ron_Fern00

Wouldn't the rule be something more like:

((P(H|E) > P(H)) if and only if (P(H) > P(H|~E))) and ((P(H|E) = P(H)) if and only if (P(H) = P(H|~E)))

So, if some statement is evidence of a hypothesis, its negation must be evidence against. And if some statement's truth value is independent of a hypothesis, then so is that statements negation.

This is implied by the expectation of posterior probabilities version. Since P(E) + P(~E) = 1, that means that P(H|E) and P(H|~E) are either equal, or one is greater than P(H) and one is less than. If they were both l... (read more)

Reply
Welcome to Less Wrong! (2010-2011)
Ron_Fern90

Hello I am a philosophy student in north Jersey. I'm 20 years old, and am very familiar with LW and the sequences. I've been reading LW now for about a year, and it has completely changed my life. I am very grateful to Eliezer and all of you for letting me have my Bayesian enlightenment at 20. When I first read the twelve virtues my life changed forever. I am definitely one of those that considers the sequences to be one of the most important works i have read, at least as far as having a personal influence.

I want to work on the hard questions of philosop... (read more)

Reply
3wedrifid
A kinda nifty blog.
2komponisto
I would like to see it become this. And not just for AI ethics/decision theory either. I'd like to see an entire "LW science" movement, where we tackle things like quantum gravity. Yes, I know it's a dream. For now.
2[anonymous]
Welcome! That's a huge amount of philosophy to look at. Might I suggest narrowing your interests down a bit, at least at first? It's very easy to read a little bit of everything, but much harder to contribute something non-trivial to every field. It seems to be a little bit of all of those things. Some people here are rabidly anti-philosophy, and so if LW overtly called itself a philosophical movement, those people would probably end up evaporating off. On the other hand, some people would very much like to see the self-help aspects of LW become secondary to the more philosophical or technical aspects. Like everything else, it's a bit hard to pin down to a distinct category.