What a rich essay. Not sure why Bayes features in the title (and opens a distracting garden path into discussions of statistics), as the actual discussion is de

What a rich essay. Not sure why Bayes features in the title (and opens a distracting garden path into discussions of statistics), as the actual discussion is deeper, regarding the use of knowledge of the past to constructing "knowledge" of the future and how these are really two different epistemologies. Rather oddly I found it connected a lot with another post from today, "Why Pessimism Sounds Smart" Deutsch says; "In the 20th century, there was a sort of congealing of the intellectual climate into a very rigid pessimism, so that a prediction or prophecy could only be taken seriously if it was negative." If he unpacks this, it's in earlier statements about the faults of induction and the lack of wonder, faith, possibility and sheer mischief that a scientific method occludes if it admits strong theories and builds a probability cone of worlds that extrapolate from them. I guess, as I was trying to say in the other thread, that Deutsch calls "epitome of the wrong theory", that we've used technology to create a set of distorting optics that stop us seeing optimistic interpretations all around us. How do we get out of that parochialism of the present? Embrace radical falliblism and entertain the idea that against all probability you, I and all the smartest people we know might be hopelessly wrong - and that that's a good thing?