[extropy-chat] A New Year's gift for Bayesians

[Robin Hanson]

At 12:03 AM 1/1/2005, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote:
>Happy New Year!  Here's a little something to start off the year.  It's a 
>holiday so you've got plenty of time to read, right?
>http://yudkowsky.net/bayes/technical.html

Well spoken.

>Why should you pay attention to scientific controversies? Why graze upon 
>such sparse and rotten feed as the media offers, when there are so many 
>solid meals to be found in textbooks? Nothing you'll read as breaking news 
>will ever hold a candle to the sheer beauty of settled science.

Yes!  I have long tried to follow this strategy, and have advised others to 
do so as well.  When people ask me for advise on what to read, I say just 
go into your local college bookstore, and browse the textbooks.  If you 
can't spend all your reading time there in the store, well buy the most 
interesting ones and take them home to read.

>I hold that everyone needs to learn at least one technical subject. 
>Physics; computer science; evolutionary biology; or Bayesian probability 
>theory, but something. Someone with no technical subjects under their belt 
>has no referent for what it means to "explain" something.

Also great advise.  To be fair, I would also say that everyone should read 
and understand one great novel, such as War and Peace.

>Laplace takes every event in your life, and every probability you assigned 
>to each event, and multiplies all the probabilities together. This is your 
>Final Judgment - the probability you assigned to your life. ...
>Er, well, except that you could commit suicide when you turned five, 
>thereby preventing your Final Judgment from decreasing any further. Or if 
>we patch a new sin onto the utility function, enjoining against suicide, 
>you could flee from mystery, avoiding all situations in which you thought 
>you might not know everything. So much for that religion.

Saint Laplace should instead extrapolate your probabilities and assign them 
to all events that happen, regardless of whether you learn about 
them.  Then you won't want to commit suicide, etc.



Robin Hanson  rhanson at gmu.edu  http://hanson.gmu.edu
Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326  FAX: 703-993-2323