Most people don’t use probability for their beliefs. They use mental processes such as the availability heuritistic, that doesn’t correspond directly to probabilities.
I meant “personal probability” as the confidence at which people intuit a belief as actually anticipatory (vs. a belief they merely assent to as an association.) This level of confidence is on a sliding scale (vs. all or nothing).
Moat-and-bailey. I don’t think there was a suggestion in the above post that you meant with probability something that doesn’t follow Kolmogorov’s axioms and where you can’t directly apply Bayes rule. Especially on LW I think it’s valuable to call things that don’t follow those axioms and therefore aren’t what’s usually meant with ‘probability’, ‘probability’.
I don’t normally point out typos (and it’s probably better on balance for LW not to be the sort of nitpicky place where everyone does) but this one is (1) almost exactly backwards and (2) sufficiently plausible-sounding to be dangerous :-). It’s motte and bailey. The motte is the raised mound with a fortification on it. The moat is the big ditch around the castle, usually filled with water.
My point was only that there is a spectrum. Some beliefs are anticipatory (i.e. people actually believe them) and others are just associations (i.e. people don’t believe them, but they find the idea of saying they believe in them to be so important they swear up and down they believe in them)...
But most beliefs are somewhere in the grey middle, with people assigning a “gut feeling probability” to each belief, without doing any math.
With those semantics people not only have a “gut feeling probability” but also a “heart feeling probability” and various similar “probabilities”. Those don’t have to be the same and depending on the context the person is going to use a different one.
Meh. Not really. There is a strong connotation in American English for “gut feeling” that means essentially instinct or intuition.
Here’s a definition I found via Google’s first page results: “an instinct or intuition; an immediate or basic feeling or reaction without a logical rationale”
This is what I meant. I think that would be clear to a high percentage of readers.
Here’s again the problem that you don’t look at the way humans reason but against the abstract concepts defined in the dictionary.
The way terms are defined in the dictionary has little to do with the empiric reality that some people give different intuitive answers when they feel into their gut or when they feel into their heart.
I meant “personal probability” as the confidence at which people intuit a belief as actually anticipatory (vs. a belief they merely assent to as an association.) This level of confidence is on a sliding scale (vs. all or nothing).
Moat-and-bailey. I don’t think there was a suggestion in the above post that you meant with probability something that doesn’t follow Kolmogorov’s axioms and where you can’t directly apply Bayes rule. Especially on LW I think it’s valuable to call things that don’t follow those axioms and therefore aren’t what’s usually meant with ‘probability’, ‘probability’.
I don’t normally point out typos (and it’s probably better on balance for LW not to be the sort of nitpicky place where everyone does) but this one is (1) almost exactly backwards and (2) sufficiently plausible-sounding to be dangerous :-). It’s motte and bailey. The motte is the raised mound with a fortification on it. The moat is the big ditch around the castle, usually filled with water.
Thanks.
The bailiffs got drunk on Baileys, crossed the moat, and demolished the motte leaving nothing but bay leaves and motes of dust floating in the air...
Okay.
My point was only that there is a spectrum. Some beliefs are anticipatory (i.e. people actually believe them) and others are just associations (i.e. people don’t believe them, but they find the idea of saying they believe in them to be so important they swear up and down they believe in them)...
But most beliefs are somewhere in the grey middle, with people assigning a “gut feeling probability” to each belief, without doing any math.
With those semantics people not only have a “gut feeling probability” but also a “heart feeling probability” and various similar “probabilities”. Those don’t have to be the same and depending on the context the person is going to use a different one.
Meh. Not really. There is a strong connotation in American English for “gut feeling” that means essentially instinct or intuition.
Here’s a definition I found via Google’s first page results: “an instinct or intuition; an immediate or basic feeling or reaction without a logical rationale”
This is what I meant. I think that would be clear to a high percentage of readers.
Here’s again the problem that you don’t look at the way humans reason but against the abstract concepts defined in the dictionary.
The way terms are defined in the dictionary has little to do with the empiric reality that some people give different intuitive answers when they feel into their gut or when they feel into their heart.