Curated. I really like that even though LessWrong is 1.5 decades old now and has Bayesianism assumed as background paradigm while people discuss everything else, nonetheless we can have good exploration of our fundamental epistemological beliefs.
The descriptions of unsolved problems, or at least incompleteness of Bayesianism strikes me as technically correct. Like others, I’m not convinced of Richard’s favored approach, but it’s interesting. In practice, I don’t think these problems undermine the use of Bayesianism in typical LessWrong thought. For example, I never thought of credences being applied to “propositions” rigorously, and more like “hypotheses” or possibilities for how things are that could be framed as models already too. Context-dependent terms like “large” or quantities without explicit tolerances like “500ft” are the kind of things that you you taboo or reduce if necessary either for your own reasoning or a bet
That said, I think the claims about mistakes and downstream consequences of the way people do Bayesianism are interesting. I’m reading a claim here I don’t recall seeing. Although we already knew that bounded reasons aren’t logically omniscient, Richard is adding a claim (if I’m understanding correctly) that this means that no matter how much strong evidence we technically have, we shouldn’t have really high confidence in any domain that requires heavy of processing that evidence, because we’re not that good at processing. I do think that leaves us with a question of judging when there’s enough evidence to be conclusive without complicated processing or not.
Something I might like a bit more factored out is the rigorous gold-standard epistemological framework and the manner in which we apply our epistemology day to day.
I fear this curation notice would be better if I’d read all the cited sources on critical rationalism, Knightian uncertainty, etc., and I’ve added them to my reading list. All in all, kudos for putting some attention on the fundamentals.
Curated. I really like that even though LessWrong is 1.5 decades old now and has Bayesianism assumed as background paradigm while people discuss everything else, nonetheless we can have good exploration of our fundamental epistemological beliefs.
The descriptions of unsolved problems, or at least incompleteness of Bayesianism strikes me as technically correct. Like others, I’m not convinced of Richard’s favored approach, but it’s interesting. In practice, I don’t think these problems undermine the use of Bayesianism in typical LessWrong thought. For example, I never thought of credences being applied to “propositions” rigorously, and more like “hypotheses” or possibilities for how things are that could be framed as models already too. Context-dependent terms like “large” or quantities without explicit tolerances like “500ft” are the kind of things that you you taboo or reduce if necessary either for your own reasoning or a bet
That said, I think the claims about mistakes and downstream consequences of the way people do Bayesianism are interesting. I’m reading a claim here I don’t recall seeing. Although we already knew that bounded reasons aren’t logically omniscient, Richard is adding a claim (if I’m understanding correctly) that this means that no matter how much strong evidence we technically have, we shouldn’t have really high confidence in any domain that requires heavy of processing that evidence, because we’re not that good at processing. I do think that leaves us with a question of judging when there’s enough evidence to be conclusive without complicated processing or not.
Something I might like a bit more factored out is the rigorous gold-standard epistemological framework and the manner in which we apply our epistemology day to day.
I fear this curation notice would be better if I’d read all the cited sources on critical rationalism, Knightian uncertainty, etc., and I’ve added them to my reading list. All in all, kudos for putting some attention on the fundamentals.