Yeah, I think I agree that the resolution here is something about how we should use these words. In practice I don’t find myself having to distinguish between “statistics” and “probability” and “uncertainty” all that often. But in this case I’d be happy to agree that “all statistical correlations are due to casual influences” given that we mean “statistical” in a more limited way than I usually think of it.
But I don’t think we know how to properly formalise or talk about that yet.
A group of LessWrong contributors has made a lot of progress on these ideas of logical uncertainty and (what I think they’re now calling) functional decision theory over the last 15ish years, although I don’t really follow it myself, so I’m not sure how close they’d say we are to having it properly formalized.
Yeah, I think I agree that the resolution here is something about how we should use these words. In practice I don’t find myself having to distinguish between “statistics” and “probability” and “uncertainty” all that often. But in this case I’d be happy to agree that “all statistical correlations are due to casual influences” given that we mean “statistical” in a more limited way than I usually think of it.
A group of LessWrong contributors has made a lot of progress on these ideas of logical uncertainty and (what I think they’re now calling) functional decision theory over the last 15ish years, although I don’t really follow it myself, so I’m not sure how close they’d say we are to having it properly formalized.
nice, yes, I think logical induction might be a way to formalise this, though others would know much more about it