Cromwell’s Rule is not EY’s invention, and relatively uncontroversial for empirical propositions (as opposed to tautologies or the like).
If you don’t accept treating probabilities as beliefs and vice versa, then this whole conversation is just a really long and unnecessarily circuitous way to say “remember that you can be wrong about stuff”.
The part that is new compared to Cromwell’s rule is that Yudkowsky doesn’t want to give probability 1 to logical statements (53 is a prime number).
Because he doesn’t want to treat 1 as a probability, you can’t expect complete sets of events to have total probability 1, despite them being tautologies. Because he doesn’t want probability 0, how do you handle the empty set? How do you assign probabilities to statements like “A and B” where A and B are logical exclusive? (the coin lands heads AND the coin lands tails).
Removing 0 and 1 from the math of probability breaks most of the standard manipulations. Again, it’s best to just say “be careful with 0 and 1 when working with odds ratios.”
Nobody is saying EY invented Cromwell’s Rule, that’s not the issue.
The issue is that “0 and 1 are not useful subjective certainties for a Bayesian agent” is a very different statement than “0 and 1 are not probabilities at all”.
You’re right, I misread your sentence about “his personal preferences” as referring to the whole claim, rather than specifically the part about what’s “mentally healthy”. I don’t think we disagree on the object level here.
Cromwell’s Rule is not EY’s invention, and relatively uncontroversial for empirical propositions (as opposed to tautologies or the like).
If you don’t accept treating probabilities as beliefs and vice versa, then this whole conversation is just a really long and unnecessarily circuitous way to say “remember that you can be wrong about stuff”.
The part that is new compared to Cromwell’s rule is that Yudkowsky doesn’t want to give probability 1 to logical statements (53 is a prime number).
Because he doesn’t want to treat 1 as a probability, you can’t expect complete sets of events to have total probability 1, despite them being tautologies. Because he doesn’t want probability 0, how do you handle the empty set? How do you assign probabilities to statements like “A and B” where A and B are logical exclusive? (the coin lands heads AND the coin lands tails).
Removing 0 and 1 from the math of probability breaks most of the standard manipulations. Again, it’s best to just say “be careful with 0 and 1 when working with odds ratios.”
Nobody is saying EY invented Cromwell’s Rule, that’s not the issue.
The issue is that “0 and 1 are not useful subjective certainties for a Bayesian agent” is a very different statement than “0 and 1 are not probabilities at all”.
You’re right, I misread your sentence about “his personal preferences” as referring to the whole claim, rather than specifically the part about what’s “mentally healthy”. I don’t think we disagree on the object level here.