“but most of our time was spent thinking about probability distributions on consistent theories” seems incorrect to me, unless I’m a lot more confused than I thought I was. What I saw was that we spent an equal amount of time on essentially three topics:
Trying to manufacture a truth-predicate weaker than provability but still able to do work, for getting around Löb’s theorem;
Binary logical versions/formulations of Solomonoff Induction (Abram’s prior);
What to do if you have an inconsistent set of probabilities over sentences / how to turn inconsistent probabilities into a prior (probability distributions on consistent theories).
(The hosts then talked about #3 for seven more hours after the official end of the mini-workshop. Scott apparently spent n hours after that writing down what he had talked and thought about. And then it was a dead end. Таких математике!)
Despite my lack of math knowledge, I enjoyed attending. I am even told that I did not distract everyone with my stupid questions and uninteresting ideas, so I will go to future ones as well.
The other participants were madmen. They didn’t take any breaks at all, only furiously bashed brains against unsolvable problems, demanding solutions from the aether and holding their ideas hostage until some otherworldly god, some invisible champion of mathematics relented to give them what they want. They did not succeed, nor did they fail, for they have not given up. To tell the truth, it was a little bit frightening.
I got all excited about math because of this, which may or may not be a positive effect, and hopefully next time I’ll have read some of the relevant papers, and understood more than a modicum.
I was there.
“but most of our time was spent thinking about probability distributions on consistent theories” seems incorrect to me, unless I’m a lot more confused than I thought I was. What I saw was that we spent an equal amount of time on essentially three topics:
Trying to manufacture a truth-predicate weaker than provability but still able to do work, for getting around Löb’s theorem;
Binary logical versions/formulations of Solomonoff Induction (Abram’s prior);
What to do if you have an inconsistent set of probabilities over sentences / how to turn inconsistent probabilities into a prior (probability distributions on consistent theories).
(The hosts then talked about #3 for seven more hours after the official end of the mini-workshop. Scott apparently spent n hours after that writing down what he had talked and thought about. And then it was a dead end. Таких математике!)
Despite my lack of math knowledge, I enjoyed attending. I am even told that I did not distract everyone with my stupid questions and uninteresting ideas, so I will go to future ones as well.
The other participants were madmen. They didn’t take any breaks at all, only furiously bashed brains against unsolvable problems, demanding solutions from the aether and holding their ideas hostage until some otherworldly god, some invisible champion of mathematics relented to give them what they want. They did not succeed, nor did they fail, for they have not given up. To tell the truth, it was a little bit frightening.
I got all excited about math because of this, which may or may not be a positive effect, and hopefully next time I’ll have read some of the relevant papers, and understood more than a modicum.
Both 2 and 3 fall under what I said we spent most of the time doing. Perhaps “majority” would have been a better word.