The reason I’m annoyed at Postrationalism is that it didn’t add anything new beyond things basically already in the sequences (but often describe themselves as such)
Well it does, because “you can’t do everything with Bayes” is an incompatible opposite to “you can do everything with Bayes”. Likewise , pluralistic ontology, of the kind Valentineadvises, is fundamentally incompatible with reductionism. Even if valentine doesn’t realise it.
Those who say that you can’t do everything with Bayes have not been very forthcoming about what you can’t do with Bayes, and even less so about what you can’t do with Bayes that you can do with other means. David Chapman, for example, keeps on taking a step back for every step forwards.
“Bayes” here I take to be a shorthand for the underlying pattern of reality which forces uncertainty to follow the Bayesian rules even when you don’t have numbers to quantify it.
And “everything” means “everything to do with action in the face of uncertainty.” (All quantifiers are bounded, even when the bound is not explicitly stated.)
Those who say that you can’t do everything with Bayes have not been very forthcoming about what you can’t do with Bayes,
I found Chapman on Bayes to be pretty clear and decisive. 1) you can’t generate novel hypotheses with Bayes 2) Bayes doesn’t give you any guidance in when to backtrack of paradigm-shft 3) you, as a human, don’t have enough Compute to execute Bayes over nontrivial domains.
“Bayes” here I take to be a shorthand for the underlying pattern of reality which forces uncertainty to follow the Bayesian rules even when you don’t have numbers to quantify it
That’s not what it means—even here. Here uncertainty is in the mind of the beholder.
If you have a personal philosophy of metaphysical uncertainty, please create an unambiguous name for it.
Edit: it’s not as if Yudkowsky originally characterised Bayes as a true-but-not-useful thing. Chapman addresses his original version.
>That’s not what it means—even here. Here uncertainty is in the mind of the beholder.
Well, yes. I was not suggesting otherwise. The uncertainty still has to follow the Bayesian pattern if it is to be resolved in the direction of more accurate beliefs and not less.
Well it does, because “you can’t do everything with Bayes” is an incompatible opposite to “you can do everything with Bayes”. Likewise , pluralistic ontology, of the kind Valentineadvises, is fundamentally incompatible with reductionism. Even if valentine doesn’t realise it.
Those who say that you can’t do everything with Bayes have not been very forthcoming about what you can’t do with Bayes, and even less so about what you can’t do with Bayes that you can do with other means. David Chapman, for example, keeps on taking a step back for every step forwards.
“Bayes” here I take to be a shorthand for the underlying pattern of reality which forces uncertainty to follow the Bayesian rules even when you don’t have numbers to quantify it.
And “everything” means “everything to do with action in the face of uncertainty.” (All quantifiers are bounded, even when the bound is not explicitly stated.)
I found Chapman on Bayes to be pretty clear and decisive. 1) you can’t generate novel hypotheses with Bayes 2) Bayes doesn’t give you any guidance in when to backtrack of paradigm-shft 3) you, as a human, don’t have enough Compute to execute Bayes over nontrivial domains.
That’s not what it means—even here. Here uncertainty is in the mind of the beholder.
If you have a personal philosophy of metaphysical uncertainty, please create an unambiguous name for it.
Edit: it’s not as if Yudkowsky originally characterised Bayes as a true-but-not-useful thing. Chapman addresses his original version.
>That’s not what it means—even here. Here uncertainty is in the mind of the beholder.
Well, yes. I was not suggesting otherwise. The uncertainty still has to follow the Bayesian pattern if it is to be resolved in the direction of more accurate beliefs and not less.
That still isn’t the original claim, it’s falling back to a more defensible position.