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No, I don't think it is. Separately from rationalist community, there is substantial amount of work showing that Bayesian updating and reasoning is in some sens

No, I don't think it is. Separately from rationalist community, there is substantial amount of work showing that Bayesian updating and reasoning is in some sense the optimal way of operating under uncertainty. It is also certainly true that garbage in and garbage out, i.e. if you feed garbage inputs, you'll get garbage out (Bayesian or not), but the advantage in my opinion of having a framework for making decisions in cases of uncertainties is extremely useful. It is often hard to really apply this for ordinary life situations, (and maybe often not worth it), but even then it's useful to think about priors/evidence, even if you don't particularly care about the final number.

analog31 6y ago
That's fair. A lot of what I read about "Bayesian reasoning" boils down to: Check your assumptions, and update your beliefs when faced with new evidence. But those habits have been with us for millennia, and I'm not arguing against them. My parents were educated in an earlier rationalist movement, and I'm deeply influenced by them. Being able to think about probabilities is useful, if they're quantifiable. And conditional probability plays a useful role in that process.
astrange 6y ago
I see two main problems with the way the lesswrong-type people try to do Bayesianism as a life philosophy. The first is that claiming to be rational* and having "priors" and "updating" them instead of "beliefs" and "changing" them is humblebragging and doesn't admit that you have beliefs that might be wrong. Even if the original idea was to make you more humble, it's dangerous when it spreads to people like young male VCs and Elon Musk who already have the world's biggest egos. The second is there's no way to set priors for silly ideas and they won't admit some things just ain't gonna happen, which means they've accidentally started a religion by refusing to not believe in various logic traps they call "existential risks" like Roko's basilisk, evil AI gods enslaving them, and so on. * for some reason they call themselves rationalist which implies being "rational", aka "always right", even though they are explicitly not rationalist, but empiricist!
fractionalhare 6y ago
> No, I don't think it is. Separately from rationalist community, there is substantial amount of work showing that Bayesian updating and reasoning is in some sense the optimal way of operating under uncertainty. With the very important proviso that the events you're uncertain about are at least probabilistically quantifiable and the "priors" are credible. It's very easy to write a long winded essay arriving at any conclusion you want if it's a subject with significant uncertainty and you can make a halfway decent appeal to whatever priors you want.

analog31 6y ago

That's fair. A lot of what I read about "Bayesian reasoning" boils down to: Check your assumptions, and update your beliefs when faced with new evidence. But those habits have been with us for millennia, and I'm not arguing against them. My parents were educated in an earlier rationalist movement, and I'm deeply influenced by them. Being able to think about probabilities is useful, if they're quantifiable. And conditional probability plays a useful role in that process.

astrange 6y ago

I see two main problems with the way the lesswrong-type people try to do Bayesianism as a life philosophy. The first is that claiming to be rational* and having "priors" and "updating" them instead of "beliefs" and "changing" them is humblebragging and doesn't admit that you have beliefs that might be wrong. Even if the original idea was to make you more humble, it's dangerous when it spreads to people like young male VCs and Elon Musk who already have the world's biggest egos. The second is there's no way to set priors for silly ideas and they won't admit some things just ain't gonna happen, which means they've accidentally started a religion by refusing to not believe in various logic traps they call "existential risks" like Roko's basilisk, evil AI gods enslaving them, and so on. * for some reason they call themselves rationalist which implies being "rational", aka "always right", even though they are explicitly not rationalist, but empiricist!

fractionalhare 6y ago

> No, I don't think it is. Separately from rationalist community, there is substantial amount of work showing that Bayesian updating and reasoning is in some sense the optimal way of operating under uncertainty. With the very important proviso that the events you're uncertain about are at least probabilistically quantifiable and the "priors" are credible. It's very easy to write a long winded essay arriving at any conclusion you want if it's a subject with significant uncertainty and you can make a halfway decent appeal to whatever priors you want.