[SEQ RERUN] Searching for Bayes-Structure
Today’s post, Searching for Bayes-Structure was originally published on 28 February 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
If a mind is arriving at true beliefs, and we assume that the second law of thermodynamics has not been violated, that mind must be doing something at least vaguely Bayesian—at least one process with a sort-of Bayesian structure somewhere—or it couldn’t possibly work.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we’ll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky’s old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Perpetual Motion Beliefs, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day’s sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
If by “vaguely Bayesian” EY means “extrapolated from previous experience, without doing any calculations”, then it is vacuously true and so not much of an insight. if there is more to it, I would appreciate if someone spelled it out for me.
The last three posts, including this one, need to be added to the wiki.
Done. Was it intentional that the “Perpetual Motion Beliefs” summary was split into two paragraphs, or was that a formatting error? I put it into the wiki as one graf, but I can change it.
It was intended as one, but the formatting did something screwy. Thanks.