(Not speaking for Eliezer, obviously.) “Carefully adjusting one’s model of the world based on new observations” seems like the core idea behind Bayesianism in all its incarnations, and I’m not sure if there is much more to it than that. The stronger the evidence, the more signifiant the update, yada-yada. It seems important to rational thinking because we all tend to fall into the trap of either ignoring evidence we don’t like or being overly gullible when something sounds impressive. Not that it helps a lot, way too many “rationalists” uncritically accept the local egregores and defend them like a religion. But the allegiance to an ingroup is emotionally stronger than logic, so we sometimes confuse rationality with rationalization. Still, relative to many other ingroups this one is not bad, so maybe Bayesianism does its thing.
I am new to this stuff but did we not have like 200 years of observations about Newton’s theories? How would have a Bayesian adjusted their models here? I use this example as a “we now know better” - Is it the “new” observation that is key?
(Not speaking for Eliezer, obviously.) “Carefully adjusting one’s model of the world based on new observations” seems like the core idea behind Bayesianism in all its incarnations, and I’m not sure if there is much more to it than that. The stronger the evidence, the more signifiant the update, yada-yada. It seems important to rational thinking because we all tend to fall into the trap of either ignoring evidence we don’t like or being overly gullible when something sounds impressive. Not that it helps a lot, way too many “rationalists” uncritically accept the local egregores and defend them like a religion. But the allegiance to an ingroup is emotionally stronger than logic, so we sometimes confuse rationality with rationalization. Still, relative to many other ingroups this one is not bad, so maybe Bayesianism does its thing.
Egregores?
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore#Contemporary_usage
I am new to this stuff but did we not have like 200 years of observations about Newton’s theories? How would have a Bayesian adjusted their models here? I use this example as a “we now know better” - Is it the “new” observation that is key?