All beliefs are probability estimates, although it can be hard to trace how a particular belief got to the degree of confidence it’s at, and while it might be a nice norm to have in a perfect world I think it’s unreasonable to demand that every time someone expresses how confident or unconfident they are in a belief, they should also clarify the entire precise history of that belief’s presence in their mind.
Apologies for the curmudgeonliness, but it really bugs me when people say things like this. The actual version of this statement that is true is
All coherent actions can be modeled as arising from beliefs that correspond to probability estimates
which is different and much weaker, as now we can argue about how important coherence is relative to other desiderata. One such desideratum is correspondence to reality, which I believe is Locaha’s point above. Personally, I would much rather have incoherent beliefs that correspond to reality than coherent beliefs that do not correspond to reality.
All beliefs are probability estimates, although it can be hard to trace how a particular belief got to the degree of confidence it’s at, and while it might be a nice norm to have in a perfect world I think it’s unreasonable to demand that every time someone expresses how confident or unconfident they are in a belief, they should also clarify the entire precise history of that belief’s presence in their mind.
Apologies for the curmudgeonliness, but it really bugs me when people say things like this. The actual version of this statement that is true is
which is different and much weaker, as now we can argue about how important coherence is relative to other desiderata. One such desideratum is correspondence to reality, which I believe is Locaha’s point above. Personally, I would much rather have incoherent beliefs that correspond to reality than coherent beliefs that do not correspond to reality.
I don’t think this belief has much correspondence to reality.