3 ms·
I think yes, you can call those statements rational, but that just gets at an additional level of difficulty here. Bayes only gets you so far as holding a belie
by nonameiguess 5y ago
I think yes, you can call those statements rational, but that just gets at an additional level of difficulty here. Bayes only gets you so far as holding a belief with maximum probability it is true, given some level of seen evidence. To actually get maximally probably true beliefs without the qualification, you need to actually gather more evidence. In some cases, that may just mean accumulating knowledge that other people already generated, but in some cases, you may need to generate knowledge from scratch. The ability to do that may be severely bounded by resource and time constraints. One person can't personally do all science, so now you need division of labor and assignment of workers to efforts, so you need optimal matching and scheduling algorithms. These are theoretically not computationally intractable, but the algorithms rely upon pre-existing accurate ability and preference ranking, so now you need to go back to information gathering and suddenly you have a bootstrapping problem here that feeding your algorithm the data it needs to tell you how to gather data in the first place requires you to gather data first.