There have been a number of posts recently on the topic of beliefs, and how fragile they can be. They would benefit A LOT by a link to Making Beliefs Pay Rent
When you say Amanda Knox either killed her roommate, or she didn’t, you’ve moved from a universe of rational beliefs to that of human-responsibility models. It’s very unclear (to me) what experience you’re predicting with “killed her roomate”. This confusion, not any handling of evidence or bayesean updates, explains a large divergence in estimates that people give. They’re giving estimates for different experiences, not different estimates of the same experience.
This is a curious interpretation of “making beliefs pay rent”. I hesitate to assert that a difference of belief about a prosaic historical fact, which you could in principle check with a “time camera”, is not a real difference of belief unless you can set out specific, realistic predictions they differ in. If one person believes that Lee Harvey Oswald was in the book depository with a rifle and another believe he wasn’t even in the building, I don’t think they need to articulate the different predictions of their beliefs to believe that they’re disagreeing.
The difference in expected experience is that some people think about the question given a time camera, while others think about the probability that additional evidence will come to their attention.
I think the probability that I’ll ever have a time camera is very low, and the chance that I’d use it to understand the details of this roomate and death relationship even lower, so there is no expected experience from this direction.
Additionally, there are lots of ways for someone to have some responsibility for a death without having a hand on the weapon directly.
To me, probability assignments of her guilt or innocence is primarily a matter of group consensus. There WAS an underlying physical reality, but the proposition given wasn’t well enough defined for me to understand the wager.
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There have been a number of posts recently on the topic of beliefs, and how fragile they can be. They would benefit A LOT by a link to Making Beliefs Pay Rent
When you say Amanda Knox either killed her roommate, or she didn’t, you’ve moved from a universe of rational beliefs to that of human-responsibility models. It’s very unclear (to me) what experience you’re predicting with “killed her roomate”. This confusion, not any handling of evidence or bayesean updates, explains a large divergence in estimates that people give. They’re giving estimates for different experiences, not different estimates of the same experience.
This is a curious interpretation of “making beliefs pay rent”. I hesitate to assert that a difference of belief about a prosaic historical fact, which you could in principle check with a “time camera”, is not a real difference of belief unless you can set out specific, realistic predictions they differ in. If one person believes that Lee Harvey Oswald was in the book depository with a rifle and another believe he wasn’t even in the building, I don’t think they need to articulate the different predictions of their beliefs to believe that they’re disagreeing.
The difference in expected experience is that some people think about the question given a time camera, while others think about the probability that additional evidence will come to their attention.
I think the probability that I’ll ever have a time camera is very low, and the chance that I’d use it to understand the details of this roomate and death relationship even lower, so there is no expected experience from this direction.
Additionally, there are lots of ways for someone to have some responsibility for a death without having a hand on the weapon directly.
To me, probability assignments of her guilt or innocence is primarily a matter of group consensus. There WAS an underlying physical reality, but the proposition given wasn’t well enough defined for me to understand the wager.
HTML links and tags don’t work here. You can edit your comment and click the “Help” tag under the textbox to see how to do links and italics in this format.