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> Dogmatic Bayesians often come armed with assertions that probability calculus is the "correct" way of doing inference and, further, that there is some kind of
by loup-vaillant 14y ago
> Dogmatic Bayesians often come armed with assertions that probability calculus is the "correct" way of doing inference and, further, that there is some kind of ethical maximum achieved when you make your decisions exclusively via inference.
Put it more crudely, "Bayesians are a bit extremist, therefore we shouldn't trust them too much".
> Unfortunately, neither of these reasons have the conclusive force that they appear to. The sanity of Cox's postulates and ethics of optimization are still (arbitrary) choices…
I have read the first two chapters of Jayne's Book, so I must ask: do you know of any other choice that isn't completely insane? You need very few assumptions to get to probability theory.
> …which serve mostly to create a formalized world for us to live in and study with efficacy.
Last time I checked, it looked like our world runs on math (which math is the big question). But even if it doesn't, do you expect we can find anything better to study it? Even if the world is chaotic, it doesn't mean our thinking shouldn't be lawful.
- tel 14y agoHaynes is intuitively convincing, but intuition isn't everything. If you buy his interpretation of his desiderata and buy his assertions (like: plausibility is a real) then its convincing to believe that his argument leads to probability---though I think Cox's Theorem as presented by Jaynes has been disproved? I think it still holds in another form though. The dogmatism is not that we should forsake math, but instead that we should accept any One True Math. History is littered with the broken careers of those who did so.
- loup-vaillant 14y agoDisproved?! frantic search… Oh, you meant for infinite sets. Somehow I'm not surprised. When one can make a 1-1 correspondence between even numbers and natural numbers… Maybe that's one reason why Nick Bostrom says Infinite Ethics is hard? http://www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/infinite.html http://www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/infinite.html Plausibility is a real… What else could it be? I still need something continuous, quantifiable, and totally ordered. Why, might one say? I'm not sure I can explain. Some things we just take for granted. Only a rock would take nothing for granted.