I think I can show how probability is not purely in the mind but also an inherent property of things, bear with me.
Lets take an event of seeing snow outside, for simplicity we know that snow is out there 3 month a year in winter, that fact is well tested and repeats each year. That distribution of snowy days is property of the reality. When we go out of bunker after spending there unknown amount of time we assign probability 1β4 to seeing a snow, and that number is function of our uncertainty about the date and our precise knowledge of when snow is out there. 1β4 is a precise description of reality if our scope is not just one day but a whole year. In this case we have a precise map, and our uncertainty is lack of knowledge of our place on the map. What we also know that if we do not have a date or season there is no better prediction and this is a property of things too.
Additionally having probability distribution you can perfectly predict accumulated effect of series of events, and this ability to predict something precisely is an indication that you grasped something about reality.
Returning to the coin 0.5 prediction of one throw is function of our uncertainty, but our prediction of sum of long series where 1 is heads and 0 is tails is a result of our knowledge of coin properties that is expressed as probability
Probability given data is an objective thing too. But point I make is that probability you assign is a mix of objective and subjective, your exact data is subjective thing, distribution is objective, and probability is a function of both.
The notion of probability to which you are pointing is the frequentist notion of probability. Eliezer favors the Bayesian notion of probability over the Frequentist notion.
1β4 is a precise description of reality if our scope is not just one day but a whole year.
That might be true but a person who knows more about the weather might make a more accurate prediction about whether it shows. If I saw the weather report I might conclude that itβs p=0.2 that it snows today even if over the whole year the distribution is that it snows on average every fourth day.
If I have more prior information I will predict a different probability that it actually snows.
I think I can show how probability is not purely in the mind but also an inherent property of things, bear with me.
Lets take an event of seeing snow outside, for simplicity we know that snow is out there 3 month a year in winter, that fact is well tested and repeats each year. That distribution of snowy days is property of the reality. When we go out of bunker after spending there unknown amount of time we assign probability 1β4 to seeing a snow, and that number is function of our uncertainty about the date and our precise knowledge of when snow is out there. 1β4 is a precise description of reality if our scope is not just one day but a whole year. In this case we have a precise map, and our uncertainty is lack of knowledge of our place on the map. What we also know that if we do not have a date or season there is no better prediction and this is a property of things too.
Additionally having probability distribution you can perfectly predict accumulated effect of series of events, and this ability to predict something precisely is an indication that you grasped something about reality.
Returning to the coin 0.5 prediction of one throw is function of our uncertainty, but our prediction of sum of long series where 1 is heads and 0 is tails is a result of our knowledge of coin properties that is expressed as probability
A statistical distribution is objective, and can be an element in a probability calculation, but is not itself probability.
Probability given data is an objective thing too. But point I make is that probability you assign is a mix of objective and subjective, your exact data is subjective thing, distribution is objective, and probability is a function of both.
The notion of probability to which you are pointing is the frequentist notion of probability. Eliezer favors the Bayesian notion of probability over the Frequentist notion.
That might be true but a person who knows more about the weather might make a more accurate prediction about whether it shows. If I saw the weather report I might conclude that itβs p=0.2 that it snows today even if over the whole year the distribution is that it snows on average every fourth day.
If I have more prior information I will predict a different probability that it actually snows.