You seem to be making an argument here against statements made in a particular book, and provide a lot of quotes, but not quotes of the specific statements you are arguing against. You claim they say Solomonoff induction solves the problem of induction, which it clearly doesn’t in full generality because that would also mean it solves the problem of the criterion, epistemic circularity, and other formulations of what we might call the hard problem of epistemology (how do you go from knowing nothing to knowing something) in a justified way, yet on most accounts Solomonoff induction is usually argued to formalize and address induction up to the limit of systematization, which seems more relevant to the rest of what you get at in your post.
So, uh, I guess just what are you trying to argue here, other than that you think these coauthors made a mistake because you don’t think they engaged with the literature on induction enough in the text of their book?
Doesn’t Solomonoff induction at least make a step towards resolving epistemic circularity, since Solomonoff prior dominates (I don’t remember in what way exactly) every probability distribution with the same or smaller support?
You seem to be making an argument here against statements made in a particular book, and provide a lot of quotes, but not quotes of the specific statements you are arguing against.
That’s not an entirely bad thing. Addressing a specific text is better than addressing an imaginary statement of your opponents position, a straw man. But it can still amount to weakmanning, which I think is your complaint.
You seem to be making an argument here against statements made in a particular book, and provide a lot of quotes, but not quotes of the specific statements you are arguing against. You claim they say Solomonoff induction solves the problem of induction, which it clearly doesn’t in full generality because that would also mean it solves the problem of the criterion, epistemic circularity, and other formulations of what we might call the hard problem of epistemology (how do you go from knowing nothing to knowing something) in a justified way, yet on most accounts Solomonoff induction is usually argued to formalize and address induction up to the limit of systematization, which seems more relevant to the rest of what you get at in your post.
So, uh, I guess just what are you trying to argue here, other than that you think these coauthors made a mistake because you don’t think they engaged with the literature on induction enough in the text of their book?
Doesn’t Solomonoff induction at least make a step towards resolving epistemic circularity, since Solomonoff prior dominates (I don’t remember in what way exactly) every probability distribution with the same or smaller support?
That’s not an entirely bad thing. Addressing a specific text is better than addressing an imaginary statement of your opponents position, a straw man. But it can still amount to weakmanning, which I think is your complaint.