may believe it likely that the government did something horrendous, but we realize the evidence is weak and circumstantial
Did you read the actual post about Bayesianism? Part of the point is you’re not allowed to do this! One can’t both think something is likely and think the evidence is weak and circumstantial! Holding a belief but not arguing for it because you know you don’t have the evidence is a defining example of irrationality. If you don’t think the government was involved, fine. But if you do you’re obligated to defend your belief.
Off Topic: I’m not going to go through every one of your positions but… how long have you been researching the issue? I haven’t looked up the answer for every single thing I’ve heard truthers argue- I don’t have the time. But every time I do look something up I find that the truthers just have no idea what they’re talking about. And some of the claims don’t even pass the blush test. For example, your first “unanswered” question just sounds crazy! I mean, HOLY SHIT! the hijackers names aren’t on the manifest! That is huge! And yet, of course they absolutely are on the flight manifests and, indeed, they flew under their own names. Indeed, we even have seating charts. For example, Mohamed Atta was in seat 8D. That’s business class, btw.
For example, your first “unanswered” question just sounds crazy! I mean, HOLY SHIT! the hijackers names aren’t on the manifest! That is huge! And yet, of course they absolutely are on the flight manifests and, indeed, they flew under their own names. Indeed, we even have seating charts. For example, Mohamed Atta was in seat 8D. That’s business class, btw.
Warning: TvTropes may ruin your life, TvTropes should be used at your discretion, (most Tropers agree that excessive use of TvTropes may be conductive to cynicism and overvaluation of most major media, Tvtropes can cause such symptoms as: Becoming dangerously genre savvy, spending increasing amounts of time on TvTropes, and a general increase in the number of tropes you use in a conversation. Please think twice before using TvTropes)
(Please consider, for the sake of wedrifid’s productivity if nothing else, including at least the explicit use of the word ‘trope’ by way of warning when liking to that black hole of super-stimulus.)
If the evidence for a particular claim is weak and circumstantial one should assign that claim a low probability and other, competing, possibilities higher probabilities.
But if you do you’re obligated to defend your belief.
You’re really not. You are not epistemicaly obliged to accept the challenge of another individual and subject your reasoning to their judgement in the form they desire. That is sometimes a useful thing to do and sometimes it is necessary for the purpose of persuasion. Of course, it’s usually more practical to attack their beliefs instead. That tends to give far more status.
Well, a little of both. You position doesn’t seem like the kind of thing it makes sense to argue about so I figured I’d make my point through demonstration and let it rest.
Normic questions just aren’t the same as factual questions. There is no particular reason to expect eventual agreement on the former, even in principle, so ending conversations is just fine and to be expected.
*Edit: Second point was based on a misunderstanding of the objection.
You comment suggested that your goals in any further conversation would be very different from my own (that you were chiefly concerned with status and persuasion and not say, facts about what discursive norms would be most beneficial)
I am actually quite offended at the accusation and do not believe you have due cause to make it.
The presumption that individuals must accept any challenge and ‘defend’ their beliefs is a tactic that is commonly exploited. It can be used to imply “you have to convince me, and if I can resist believing you then I am high status”. It is something that I object to vocally and is just not part of rationality as I understand it. ‘Defensible’, just like ‘burden of proof’ just isn’t a bayesian concept, for all the part it plays in traditional rationality.
I actually didn’t think you would find my correction of a minor point objectionable. I had assumed you used the phrase ‘obligated to defend’ offhandedly and my reply was a mere tangent. I expected you to just revise it to something like “But if you do then don’t expect to be taken seriously unless you can defend your belief”.
Edit: Also, I just managed to lose like 9 karma in the span of two minutes. I presume it isn’t you, I’m just airing grievances to the downvoter, should they realize this.
I claim two. I don’t think that warranted an upvote because the point it made was not a good one and it also sub-communicated the attitude that you made explicit here. I also downvoted your original comment once it became clear that you present the normative assertion as a true part of your point rather than an accident of language. Come to think of it I originally upvoted the comment so that would count twice.
I left the immediate parent untouched because although it is offensive and somewhat of a reputational attack in that sense it at least is forthright and not underhanded. Outside of this context the last comment of yours I recall voting on is this one, which I considered quite insightful.
Please refrain from making such accusations again in the future without consideration. That I disagree with a single phrase doesn’t warrant going personal. I didn’t even take note of which author had said ‘are obligated to defend’ when I replied, much less seek to steal their status.
Whoa! On reflection this looks like an extended misunderstanding. This isn’t especially surprising as we’ve had trouble communicating before.
I am actually quite offended at the accusation and do not believe you have due cause to make it.
I apologize for offending you. In making the comment I truly didn’t mean it as a personal insult- though I can see how it came off that way. There is a not insignificant tendency around here to A) place truth-seeking as secondary to winning and B) reduce things to status games. So in your comment I pattern matched this
That is sometimes a useful thing to do and sometimes it is necessary for the purpose of persuasion. Of course, it’s usually more practical to attack their beliefs instead. That tends to give far more status.
with that tendency. And so in saying that persuasion and status seemed to be what you were concerned with I thought I was basically just recognizing the position you had taken.
There isn’t an explicit transition to this second part. I can see in retrospect that this was a comment about defending beliefs. You’re saying, no it is not an obligation, just sometimes a good idea, here is when it is (pragmatically) a good idea. What I saw the first time was “No, there isn’t any obligation like this. Here are the concerns that should instead enter into the decision to defend beliefs: Status and persuasion.” Even if the expectation that someone defends their beliefs doesn’t rise to the level of an obligation it still seems like the pro-social reasons for doing it have to do with truth-seeking and sharing information. So when all I see is persuasion and status I inferred that you weren’t concerned with these other things. Does that make it clear where I was getting it from, even if I got it wrong?
I actually didn’t think you would find my correction of a minor point objectionable. I had assumed you used the phrase ‘obligated to defend’ offhandedly and my reply was a mere tangent. I expected you to just revise it to something like “But if you do then don’t expect to be taken seriously unless you can defend your belief”.
It wasn’t a particularly deliberate phrasing. That said, I think it is a defensible, even obvious, rule of discourse. Of course, one way of describing what happens to someone when they don’t obey such rules is just that they are no longer taken seriously. Your tone in the first comment, didn’t suggest to me that you were only making a minor point and is part of the reason I interpreted it as differing from my own view more radically than it apparently does. And, I mean, an obligation that people be prepared to give reasons for their views seems like a totally reasonable thing to have in an attempt at cooperative rationalist discourse. Indeed, if people refuse to defend beliefs I have no idea how this kind of cooperation is suppose to proceed. From this perspective your objection looks like it has to be coming from a pretty different set of assumptions.
I’m going to edit the offending comment and remove the material. Would you consider making this last comment somewhat less scolding and accusatory as it was an honest misunderstanding?
Hi Jack, thanks for that. I deleted my reply. I can see why you would object to that first interpretation. I too like to keep my ‘winning’ quite separate from my truth seeking and would join you in objecting to exhortations that people should explain reasons for their beliefs only for pragmatic purposes. It may be that my firm disapproval of mixing epistemic rationality with pragmatics was directed at you, not the mutual enemy so pardon me if that is the case.
I certainly support giving explanations and justifications for beliefs. The main reason I wouldn’t support it as an obligation is for the kind of thing that you thought I was doing to you. Games can be played with norms and I don’t want people who are less comfortable with filtering out those sort of games to feel obligated to change their beliefs if they cannot defend them according to the criteria of a persuader.
Part of the point is you’re not allowed to do this!
I’m allowed to believe whatever I want; I’m just not allowed to try to convince you of it unless I have a rational argument.
Isn’t this what Bayesianism is all about—reaching the most likely conclusion in the face of weak or inconclusive evidence? Or am I misunderstanding something?
I do have arguments for my belief, but I’m not really prepared to spend the time getting into it; it’s not essential to my main thesis, and I mentioned it only in passing as a way of giving context, to wit: “some people believe this, and I’m not trying to dismiss them, partly because I happen to agree with them, but that belief is entirely beside the point”.
On your OT: You win a cookie! I had to research this a bit to figure out what happened, but apparently some 9/11 researchers found a list of passenger-victims and thought it was a passenger manifest. One anomaly does remain in that 6 of the alleged hijackers have turned up alive, but I wouldn’t call that enough of an anomaly to be worth worrying about.
(Found the offending factoid under “comments” on the position page; fixing it...)
I’m allowed to believe whatever I want; I’m just not allowed to try to convince you of it unless I have a rational argument.
Traditional Rationality is often expressed as social rules, under which this claim might work. But in Bayesian Rationality, there is math that tells you exactly what you ought to believe given the evidence you have observed.
Okay—but in practicality, what if I don’t have time (or mental focus, or whatever resources it takes) to explicitly identify, enumerate, and evaluate each piece of evidence that I may be considering? It took me over an hour just to get this far with a Bayesian analysis of one hypothesis, which I’m probably not even doing right.
Or do we step outside the realm of Bayesian Rationality when we look at practical considerations like “finite computing resources”?
I’d actually say, start with the prior and with the strongest piece of evidence you think you have. This of itself should reveal something interesting and disputable.
As someone who recently failed at an attempt at Bayesian analysis let my try to offer a few pointers:
You correctly conclude that “What is the likelihood that evidence E would occur even if H were false?” is more immediately relevant than “What is the likelihood that evidence E would not occur if H were true?”, which you only asked because you got the syntax wrong, “the likelihood that evidence E would occur even if H were false” would be P(E|~H).
P(H) is your prior, the probability before considering any evidence E, not the probability in absence of any evidence.
The considerations you list under evidence against are of the sort you would make when determining the priors, asking “What is the likelihood that Bush is a twit if H were true?” and so on would be very difficult to set probabilities for, you CAN threat it that way but it’s far from straightforward.
Actually I have never seen a non-trivial example of this sort of analysis for this sort of real word problem done right on this site.
H = this sort of analysis is practical
E = user FAWS has not seen any example of this sort of analysis done right.
P(H)=0.9 smart people like Eliezer seem to praise Bayesian thinking, and people ask for priors and so on.
P(E|H)= 0.3 I haven’t read every comment, probably not even 10%, but if this is used anywhere it would be here, and if it’s practical it should be used at least somewhat regularly.
P(E|~H) =0.9 Might still be done even if impractical when it’s a point of pride and / or group identification, which could be argued to be the case.
I’m allowed to believe whatever I want; I’m just not allowed to try to convince you of it unless I have a rational argument.
Isn’t this what Bayesianism is all about—reaching the most likely conclusion in the face of weak or inconclusive evidence? Or am I misunderstanding something?
The best source to look at here is Probability is Subjectively Objective. You cannot (in the bayesian sense) believe whatever you ‘want’. There is precisely one set of beliefs to which you are epistemically entitled given your current evidence even though I are obliged to form a different set of beliefs given what I have been exposed to.
Isn’t this what Bayesianism is all about—reaching the most likely conclusion in the face of weak or inconclusive evidence? Or am I misunderstanding something?
Reaching the most likely conclusion while uncertain yes. But that doesn’t mean believing things without evidence.
One anomaly does remain in that 6 of the alleged hijackers have turned up alive, but I wouldn’t call that enough of an anomaly to be worth worrying about.
Really? I’d worry about that. That would be a big deal. At the least it would be really embarrassing for the FBI. But it isn’t true either!
But that doesn’t mean believing things without evidence.
Lacking sufficient resources (time, energy, focus) to be able to enumerate one’s evidence is not the same as not having any. I believe that I have sufficient evidence to believe what I believe, but I do not currently have a transcript of the reasoning by which I arrived at this belief.
But it isn’t true either!
What is your evidence that it isn’t true? Here’s mine. Note that each claim is footnoted with a reference to a mainstream source.
What is your evidence that it isn’t true? Here’s mine.
What you provide is evidence that some people shared names and some other data with the hijackers. You haven’t shown that the actual people identified by the FBI later turned up alive.
Keeping my comments on topic:
Did you read the actual post about Bayesianism? Part of the point is you’re not allowed to do this! One can’t both think something is likely and think the evidence is weak and circumstantial! Holding a belief but not arguing for it because you know you don’t have the evidence is a defining example of irrationality. If you don’t think the government was involved, fine. But if you do you’re obligated to defend your belief.
Off Topic: I’m not going to go through every one of your positions but… how long have you been researching the issue? I haven’t looked up the answer for every single thing I’ve heard truthers argue- I don’t have the time. But every time I do look something up I find that the truthers just have no idea what they’re talking about. And some of the claims don’t even pass the blush test. For example, your first “unanswered” question just sounds crazy! I mean, HOLY SHIT! the hijackers names aren’t on the manifest! That is huge! And yet, of course they absolutely are on the flight manifests and, indeed, they flew under their own names. Indeed, we even have seating charts. For example, Mohamed Atta was in seat 8D. That’s business class, btw.
Ah, but… what are the odds that A HIJACKER WOULD FLY IN BUSINESS CLASS??!?
I hear business class gives better ‘final meals’.
This is a crowning moment of awesome.
Warning: TvTropes may ruin your life, TvTropes should be used at your discretion, (most Tropers agree that excessive use of TvTropes may be conductive to cynicism and overvaluation of most major media, Tvtropes can cause such symptoms as: Becoming dangerously genre savvy, spending increasing amounts of time on TvTropes, and a general increase in the number of tropes you use in a conversation. Please think twice before using TvTropes)
Does this mean if we’re in a simulation written for entertainment I’m about to get killed off?
(Please consider, for the sake of wedrifid’s productivity if nothing else, including at least the explicit use of the word ‘trope’ by way of warning when liking to that black hole of super-stimulus.)
One definitely can. What else is one supposed to do when evidence is weak and circumstantial? Assign probabilities that sum to less than one?
If the evidence for a particular claim is weak and circumstantial one should assign that claim a low probability and other, competing, possibilities higher probabilities.
What if the evidence for those is also weak and circumstantial?
Or what if one had assigned that claim a very high prior probability?
You’re really not. You are not epistemicaly obliged to accept the challenge of another individual and subject your reasoning to their judgement in the form they desire. That is sometimes a useful thing to do and sometimes it is necessary for the purpose of persuasion. Of course, it’s usually more practical to attack their beliefs instead. That tends to give far more status.
No. Wrong! You totally are obligated.
Are you being facetious or not?
Well, a little of both. You position doesn’t seem like the kind of thing it makes sense to argue about so I figured I’d make my point through demonstration and let it rest.
It seems you demonstrated my point.
Normic questions just aren’t the same as factual questions. There is no particular reason to expect eventual agreement on the former, even in principle, so ending conversations is just fine and to be expected.
*Edit: Second point was based on a misunderstanding of the objection.
I am actually quite offended at the accusation and do not believe you have due cause to make it.
The presumption that individuals must accept any challenge and ‘defend’ their beliefs is a tactic that is commonly exploited. It can be used to imply “you have to convince me, and if I can resist believing you then I am high status”. It is something that I object to vocally and is just not part of rationality as I understand it. ‘Defensible’, just like ‘burden of proof’ just isn’t a bayesian concept, for all the part it plays in traditional rationality.
I actually didn’t think you would find my correction of a minor point objectionable. I had assumed you used the phrase ‘obligated to defend’ offhandedly and my reply was a mere tangent. I expected you to just revise it to something like “But if you do then don’t expect to be taken seriously unless you can defend your belief”.
I claim two. I don’t think that warranted an upvote because the point it made was not a good one and it also sub-communicated the attitude that you made explicit here. I also downvoted your original comment once it became clear that you present the normative assertion as a true part of your point rather than an accident of language. Come to think of it I originally upvoted the comment so that would count twice.
I left the immediate parent untouched because although it is offensive and somewhat of a reputational attack in that sense it at least is forthright and not underhanded. Outside of this context the last comment of yours I recall voting on is this one, which I considered quite insightful.
Please refrain from making such accusations again in the future without consideration. That I disagree with a single phrase doesn’t warrant going personal. I didn’t even take note of which author had said ‘are obligated to defend’ when I replied, much less seek to steal their status.
Whoa! On reflection this looks like an extended misunderstanding. This isn’t especially surprising as we’ve had trouble communicating before.
I apologize for offending you. In making the comment I truly didn’t mean it as a personal insult- though I can see how it came off that way. There is a not insignificant tendency around here to A) place truth-seeking as secondary to winning and B) reduce things to status games. So in your comment I pattern matched this
with that tendency. And so in saying that persuasion and status seemed to be what you were concerned with I thought I was basically just recognizing the position you had taken.
There isn’t an explicit transition to this second part. I can see in retrospect that this was a comment about defending beliefs. You’re saying, no it is not an obligation, just sometimes a good idea, here is when it is (pragmatically) a good idea. What I saw the first time was “No, there isn’t any obligation like this. Here are the concerns that should instead enter into the decision to defend beliefs: Status and persuasion.” Even if the expectation that someone defends their beliefs doesn’t rise to the level of an obligation it still seems like the pro-social reasons for doing it have to do with truth-seeking and sharing information. So when all I see is persuasion and status I inferred that you weren’t concerned with these other things. Does that make it clear where I was getting it from, even if I got it wrong?
It wasn’t a particularly deliberate phrasing. That said, I think it is a defensible, even obvious, rule of discourse. Of course, one way of describing what happens to someone when they don’t obey such rules is just that they are no longer taken seriously. Your tone in the first comment, didn’t suggest to me that you were only making a minor point and is part of the reason I interpreted it as differing from my own view more radically than it apparently does. And, I mean, an obligation that people be prepared to give reasons for their views seems like a totally reasonable thing to have in an attempt at cooperative rationalist discourse. Indeed, if people refuse to defend beliefs I have no idea how this kind of cooperation is suppose to proceed. From this perspective your objection looks like it has to be coming from a pretty different set of assumptions.
I’m going to edit the offending comment and remove the material. Would you consider making this last comment somewhat less scolding and accusatory as it was an honest misunderstanding?
Hi Jack, thanks for that. I deleted my reply. I can see why you would object to that first interpretation. I too like to keep my ‘winning’ quite separate from my truth seeking and would join you in objecting to exhortations that people should explain reasons for their beliefs only for pragmatic purposes. It may be that my firm disapproval of mixing epistemic rationality with pragmatics was directed at you, not the mutual enemy so pardon me if that is the case.
I certainly support giving explanations and justifications for beliefs. The main reason I wouldn’t support it as an obligation is for the kind of thing that you thought I was doing to you. Games can be played with norms and I don’t want people who are less comfortable with filtering out those sort of games to feel obligated to change their beliefs if they cannot defend them according to the criteria of a persuader.
I’m allowed to believe whatever I want; I’m just not allowed to try to convince you of it unless I have a rational argument.
Isn’t this what Bayesianism is all about—reaching the most likely conclusion in the face of weak or inconclusive evidence? Or am I misunderstanding something?
I do have arguments for my belief, but I’m not really prepared to spend the time getting into it; it’s not essential to my main thesis, and I mentioned it only in passing as a way of giving context, to wit: “some people believe this, and I’m not trying to dismiss them, partly because I happen to agree with them, but that belief is entirely beside the point”.
On your OT: You win a cookie! I had to research this a bit to figure out what happened, but apparently some 9/11 researchers found a list of passenger-victims and thought it was a passenger manifest. One anomaly does remain in that 6 of the alleged hijackers have turned up alive, but I wouldn’t call that enough of an anomaly to be worth worrying about.
(Found the offending factoid under “comments” on the position page; fixing it...)
Traditional Rationality is often expressed as social rules, under which this claim might work. But in Bayesian Rationality, there is math that tells you exactly what you ought to believe given the evidence you have observed.
See No One Can Exempt You From Rationality’s Laws.
Okay—but in practicality, what if I don’t have time (or mental focus, or whatever resources it takes) to explicitly identify, enumerate, and evaluate each piece of evidence that I may be considering? It took me over an hour just to get this far with a Bayesian analysis of one hypothesis, which I’m probably not even doing right.
Or do we step outside the realm of Bayesian Rationality when we look at practical considerations like “finite computing resources”?
I’d actually say, start with the prior and with the strongest piece of evidence you think you have. This of itself should reveal something interesting and disputable.
As someone who recently failed at an attempt at Bayesian analysis let my try to offer a few pointers: You correctly conclude that “What is the likelihood that evidence E would occur even if H were false?” is more immediately relevant than “What is the likelihood that evidence E would not occur if H were true?”, which you only asked because you got the syntax wrong, “the likelihood that evidence E would occur even if H were false” would be P(E|~H). P(H) is your prior, the probability before considering any evidence E, not the probability in absence of any evidence. The considerations you list under evidence against are of the sort you would make when determining the priors, asking “What is the likelihood that Bush is a twit if H were true?” and so on would be very difficult to set probabilities for, you CAN threat it that way but it’s far from straightforward.
Actually I have never seen a non-trivial example of this sort of analysis for this sort of real word problem done right on this site.
H = this sort of analysis is practical
E = user FAWS has not seen any example of this sort of analysis done right.
P(H)=0.9 smart people like Eliezer seem to praise Bayesian thinking, and people ask for priors and so on.
P(E|H)= 0.3 I haven’t read every comment, probably not even 10%, but if this is used anywhere it would be here, and if it’s practical it should be used at least somewhat regularly.
P(E|~H) =0.9 Might still be done even if impractical when it’s a point of pride and / or group identification, which could be argued to be the case.
Calculating the posterior probability P(H|E):
P(H|E) = P(H&E)/P(E)= P(H)*P(E|H)/P(E)= P(H)*P(E|H)/(P(E|H)*P(H)+P(E|~H)\P(~H))= 0.9 * 0.3 /(0.3 * 0.9 + 0.9 * 0.1)= 0.75
The best source to look at here is Probability is Subjectively Objective. You cannot (in the bayesian sense) believe whatever you ‘want’. There is precisely one set of beliefs to which you are epistemically entitled given your current evidence even though I are obliged to form a different set of beliefs given what I have been exposed to.
Typo in the link syntax. Corrected: Probability is Subjectively Objective.
Reaching the most likely conclusion while uncertain yes. But that doesn’t mean believing things without evidence.
Really? I’d worry about that. That would be a big deal. At the least it would be really embarrassing for the FBI. But it isn’t true either!
Lacking sufficient resources (time, energy, focus) to be able to enumerate one’s evidence is not the same as not having any. I believe that I have sufficient evidence to believe what I believe, but I do not currently have a transcript of the reasoning by which I arrived at this belief.
What is your evidence that it isn’t true? Here’s mine. Note that each claim is footnoted with a reference to a mainstream source.
What you provide is evidence that some people shared names and some other data with the hijackers. You haven’t shown that the actual people identified by the FBI later turned up alive.
Here’s Wikipedia on the subject.