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?
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.
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.
It's simple enough of a proposal. Make a page where we post open problems, work on solutions to said problems, and where we can discuss these problems prior to attempting to solve them with other LWers. I would suggest two main parts:
I would propose using the same karma system we use now. Each problem could have a long list of proposed solutions, cautionary comments, and newly found lemmas relevant to the problem, and each solution, warning, or lemma, could... (read 189 more words →)
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 probability is not frequency.
The problem is that they all conflate "probability" with "subjective degree of belief" and "frequency", the bayesian conflates subjective degree of belief and probability. The... (read more)
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.
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.
"Minorfalsology" is totally the best word for it.
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 stick to break apart and probe matter.
Lesswrong needs to solve philosophical problems to do its job, whether... (read more)
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 less than P(H), then P(H|E)P(E)+P(H|~E)P(~E) would have a lesser value than the largest conditional probability... (read more)
I am confused, I thought we were to weight hypotheses by 2^-(kolmogorov(H)) not 2^-length(H). Am I missing something?