Honestly, I feel like if Eliezer had left out any mention of the math of Bayes’ Theorem from the sequences, I would be no worse off. The seven statements you wrote seem fairly self-evident by themselves.
It’s a bit like learning thermodynamics. It may seem self-evident that things have temperatures, that you can’t get energy from nowhere, and that the more you put things together, the more they fall apart, but the science of thermodynamics puts these intuitively plausible things on a solid foundation (being respectively the zeroth, first, and second laws of thermodynamics). That foundation is itself built on lower-level physics. If you do not know why perpetual motion machines are ruled out, but just have an unexplained intuition that they can’t work, you will not have a solid ground for judging someone’s claim to have invented one.
The Bayesian process of updating beliefs from evidence by Bayes theorem is the foundation that underlies all of these “obvious” statements, and enables one to see why they are true.
Yes, who knows how many other ‘obvious’ statements you might believe otherwise, such as “Falsification is a different type of process from confirmation.”
Falsifying X is obviously the same as confirming not-X … but confirming that the culprit was Mortimer Q. Snodgrass is quantitatively very different from confirming that the culprit was not Mortimer Q. Snodgrass, and like someone once said, a qualitative difference is just a quantitative difference that is large enough.
It’s a bit like learning thermodynamics. It may seem self-evident that things have temperatures, that you can’t get energy from nowhere, and that the more you put things together, the more they fall apart, but the science of thermodynamics puts these intuitively plausible things on a solid foundation (being respectively the zeroth, first, and second laws of thermodynamics). That foundation is itself built on lower-level physics. If you do not know why perpetual motion machines are ruled out, but just have an unexplained intuition that they can’t work, you will not have a solid ground for judging someone’s claim to have invented one.
The Bayesian process of updating beliefs from evidence by Bayes theorem is the foundation that underlies all of these “obvious” statements, and enables one to see why they are true.
Yes, who knows how many other ‘obvious’ statements you might believe otherwise, such as “Falsification is a different type of process from confirmation.”
Falsifying X is obviously the same as confirming not-X … but confirming that the culprit was Mortimer Q. Snodgrass is quantitatively very different from confirming that the culprit was not Mortimer Q. Snodgrass, and like someone once said, a qualitative difference is just a quantitative difference that is large enough.