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How on earth is Bayesianism a form of behaviorism" ? And what is it with the cult of Popper. Popperism isn't "underrated", it's considered the gold standard of

How on earth is Bayesianism a form of behaviorism" ? And what is it with the cult of Popper. Popperism isn't "underrated", it's considered the gold standard of epistemology despite being a vague philosophical theory full of holes. Contrast that with Solomonoff induction which has a rigorous grounding and which offers hypothesis testing and rejection as a trivial subcase.

enord 13y ago
How is Bayesianism not a form of behaviorism? The essay devotes a paragraph to explain this point allthough Deutsch assumes the reader is familiar with behaviorism and probabilistic methods used i AI.
- jorleif 13y ago
  Had he said that Bayesian decision theory with optimization of utility functions etc. was behaviorism, then I would agree, but Bayesian formulations can be used for many other things as well. At least one can propose very complex internal models, which behaviorists were criticized for not considering.
  - murbard2 13y ago
    Agreed. Besides, behaviorism was abandoned in psychology because it was crazy, not because there's something wrong with reinforcement learning. It was treating the human mind as a black box trying to pretend we have no insight in human thoughts. It was trying to avoid antropomorphizing people as Morgenbesser put it. In fact, quite the opposite, I'd attribute this blatant idiocy to Popperism. After all, introspection isn't testable or falsifiable in a popperian sense. There's no room for the concept of models in Popperianism. There are just big black box ideas that you test and are falsified or not.
paganel 13y ago
> Contrast that with Solomonoff induction which has a rigorous grounding and which offers hypothesis testing and rejection as a trivial subcase. I may be wrong, but I still couldn't find anyone that could convince me that Hume's response to induction was not valid. From here (which was linked to in the Solomonoff induction wiki page) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor#Practical_considerations_and_pragmatism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor#Practical_consi... > The pragmatist may go on, as David Hume did on the topic induction, that there is no satisfying alternative to granting this premise. Though one may claim that Occam's razor is invalid as a premise helping to regulate theories, putting this doubt into practice would mean doubting whether every step forward will result in locomotion or a nuclear explosion. In other words still: "What's the alternative? Again, and this is also my opinion, I think we're afraid to admit that either we don't know anything at all or that most of the things that we "know" are based on intrinsic faith, with the accent on the word "faith". Granted, this is at least a 2,500 years problem, dating back to the Old Greeks.

enord 13y ago

How is Bayesianism not a form of behaviorism? The essay devotes a paragraph to explain this point allthough Deutsch assumes the reader is familiar with behaviorism and probabilistic methods used i AI.

jorleif 13y ago
Had he said that Bayesian decision theory with optimization of utility functions etc. was behaviorism, then I would agree, but Bayesian formulations can be used for many other things as well. At least one can propose very complex internal models, which behaviorists were criticized for not considering.
- murbard2 13y ago
  Agreed. Besides, behaviorism was abandoned in psychology because it was crazy, not because there's something wrong with reinforcement learning. It was treating the human mind as a black box trying to pretend we have no insight in human thoughts. It was trying to avoid antropomorphizing people as Morgenbesser put it. In fact, quite the opposite, I'd attribute this blatant idiocy to Popperism. After all, introspection isn't testable or falsifiable in a popperian sense. There's no room for the concept of models in Popperianism. There are just big black box ideas that you test and are falsified or not.

paganel 13y ago

> Contrast that with Solomonoff induction which has a rigorous grounding and which offers hypothesis testing and rejection as a trivial subcase. I may be wrong, but I still couldn't find anyone that could convince me that Hume's response to induction was not valid. From here (which was linked to in the Solomonoff induction wiki page) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor#Practical_considerations_and_pragmatism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor#Practical_consi... > The pragmatist may go on, as David Hume did on the topic induction, that there is no satisfying alternative to granting this premise. Though one may claim that Occam's razor is invalid as a premise helping to regulate theories, putting this doubt into practice would mean doubting whether every step forward will result in locomotion or a nuclear explosion. In other words still: "What's the alternative? Again, and this is also my opinion, I think we're afraid to admit that either we don't know anything at all or that most of the things that we "know" are based on intrinsic faith, with the accent on the word "faith". Granted, this is at least a 2,500 years problem, dating back to the Old Greeks.