“This community has become something of a shitshow. Setting badmath to private while we try to decide on a way forward with the subreddit.”
Oh no, really? Who would have thought that the sorts of people who have learned to enjoy indulging contempt would eventually turn on each other.
I really wanted to see that argument though, tell me, to what extent was it an argument? Cause I feel like if a person in our school wanted to settle this, they’d just distinguish the practical cases EY’s talking about from the mathematical cases the conversants are talking about and everyone would immediately wake up and realise how immaterial the disagreement always was (though some of them might decide to be mad about that instead), but also, maybe Eleizer kind of likes getting people riled up about this so maybe dispersing the confusion never crossed his mind. Contempt vampires meet contempt bender. Kismesis is forged.
I shouldn’t contribute to this “fight”, but I can’t resist. I’d have recommended he bring up how the brunt of the causal network formalization explicitly disallows certain or impossible events on the math level once you cross into a certain level of sophistication (I forget where the threshold was, but I remember thinking “well the bayesian networks that supports 0s and 1s sounds pretty darn limited and I’m going to give up on them just as my elders advised.”)
Ultimately, the “can’t be 0 or 1” restriction is pretty obviously needed for a lot of the formulas to work robustly (you can’t even use the definition of conditional probability without restricting the prior of the evidence! Cause there’s a division in it! There are lots of divisions in probability theory!)
So I propose that we give a name to that restriction, and I offer the name “credences”. (Currently, it seems the word “credence” is just assigned to a bad overload of “probability” that uses percent notation instead of normal range. I doubt anyone will miss it.)
A probability is a credence iff it is neither 0 nor 1. A practical real-world right and justly radically skeptical bayesian reasoner should probably restrict a large, well-delineated subset of its evidence weights to being credences.
And now we can talk about credences and there’s no need for any more confusion, if we want.
It’s back btw. If it ever goes down again you can probably get it on wayback machine. And yes the /r/bad* subreddits are full of terrible academia snobbery. Badmathematics is the best of the bunch because mathematics is at least kind of objective. So they mostly talk about philosophy of mathematics.
The problem is formal models of probability theory have problems with logical uncertainty. You can’t assign a nonzero probability to a false logical statement. All the reasoning about probability theory is around modelling uncertainty in the unkown external world. This is an early attempt to think about logical uncertainty. Which MIRI has now published papers on and tried to formalize.
Just calling them “log odds” is fine and they are widely used in real work.
Btw what does “Response to previous version” mean? Was this article significantly editted? It doesn’t seem so confrontational reading it now.
We published new versions of a lot of sequences posts a few months ago. If you click on the “Response to previous version” text, you can read the original text that the comment was referring to.
Wait, these old posts have been edited? I don’t see the “Response to previous version” link. I’d like to read the originals, as they were written, in chronological order… there are other ways to consume the compendium if I so desired.
Yeah, they were edited as part of the process of compiling Rationality: AI to Zombies. Usually that just involved adding some sources, cleaning up some sentences and fixing some typos.
The “Response to previous version” link is at the top of every comment that was posted on the previous version of the post. See here:
Okay. Summary: All of Eliezer’s writing on this assumed the context of AGI/applied epistemology. That wasn’t obvious from the materials, and it did not occur to this group of pure mathematicians to assume that same focus, because they’re pure mathematicians and because of the activity they had decided to engage in on that day.
/r/badmathematics is shuttered now, apparently.
Oh no, really? Who would have thought that the sorts of people who have learned to enjoy indulging contempt would eventually turn on each other.
I really wanted to see that argument though, tell me, to what extent was it an argument? Cause I feel like if a person in our school wanted to settle this, they’d just distinguish the practical cases EY’s talking about from the mathematical cases the conversants are talking about and everyone would immediately wake up and realise how immaterial the disagreement always was (though some of them might decide to be mad about that instead), but also, maybe Eleizer kind of likes getting people riled up about this so maybe dispersing the confusion never crossed his mind. Contempt vampires meet contempt bender. Kismesis is forged.
I shouldn’t contribute to this “fight”, but I can’t resist. I’d have recommended he bring up how the brunt of the causal network formalization explicitly disallows certain or impossible events on the math level once you cross into a certain level of sophistication (I forget where the threshold was, but I remember thinking “well the bayesian networks that supports 0s and 1s sounds pretty darn limited and I’m going to give up on them just as my elders advised.”)
Ultimately, the “can’t be 0 or 1” restriction is pretty obviously needed for a lot of the formulas to work robustly (you can’t even use the definition of conditional probability without restricting the prior of the evidence! Cause there’s a division in it! There are lots of divisions in probability theory!)
So I propose that we give a name to that restriction, and I offer the name “credences”. (Currently, it seems the word “credence” is just assigned to a bad overload of “probability” that uses percent notation instead of normal range. I doubt anyone will miss it.)
A probability is a credence iff it is neither 0 nor 1. A practical real-world right and justly radically skeptical bayesian reasoner should probably restrict a large, well-delineated subset of its evidence weights to being credences.
And now we can talk about credences and there’s no need for any more confusion, if we want.
It’s back btw. If it ever goes down again you can probably get it on wayback machine. And yes the /r/bad* subreddits are full of terrible academia snobbery. Badmathematics is the best of the bunch because mathematics is at least kind of objective. So they mostly talk about philosophy of mathematics.
The problem is formal models of probability theory have problems with logical uncertainty. You can’t assign a nonzero probability to a false logical statement. All the reasoning about probability theory is around modelling uncertainty in the unkown external world. This is an early attempt to think about logical uncertainty. Which MIRI has now published papers on and tried to formalize.
Just calling them “log odds” is fine and they are widely used in real work.
Btw what does “Response to previous version” mean? Was this article significantly editted? It doesn’t seem so confrontational reading it now.
We published new versions of a lot of sequences posts a few months ago. If you click on the “Response to previous version” text, you can read the original text that the comment was referring to.
Wait, these old posts have been edited? I don’t see the “Response to previous version” link. I’d like to read the originals, as they were written, in chronological order… there are other ways to consume the compendium if I so desired.
Yeah, they were edited as part of the process of compiling Rationality: AI to Zombies. Usually that just involved adding some sources, cleaning up some sentences and fixing some typos.
The “Response to previous version” link is at the top of every comment that was posted on the previous version of the post. See here:
https://res.cloudinary.com/lesswrong-2-0/image/upload/v1577074008/Screen_Shot_2019-12-22_at_7.48.08_PM_n9bcp3.png
I see it now. Is there some way to make the original article the default View? Or a link to the prior version at the top of the article?
You can click on the date-stamp at the top of the post and select the earliest version from there.
Hmm. Reading.
Okay. Summary: All of Eliezer’s writing on this assumed the context of AGI/applied epistemology. That wasn’t obvious from the materials, and it did not occur to this group of pure mathematicians to assume that same focus, because they’re pure mathematicians and because of the activity they had decided to engage in on that day.