[ExI] Probability is "subjectively objective"

Bryan Bishop kanzure at gmail.com
Mon Jul 14 18:14:29 UTC 2008


On Monday 14 July 2008, Jef Allbright wrote:
<snip>
>     But it also makes a deep philosophical point as well,
>     which I never saw Jaynes spell out explicitly, but I think
>     he would have approved: there is no such thing as a
>     probability that isn't in any mind.  Any mind that takes
>     in evidence and outputs probability estimates of the next
>     event, remember, can be viewed as a prior - so there is
>     no probability without priors/minds."
>
> <http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/07/probability-is.html>
>
> A personal aside:
>
> The last several months, I have repeatedly enjoyed a strange sense of
> being "virtually productive", in the sense that issues of significant
> importance to me personally are getting done -- by others.
<snip>
> I'll highlight here a segment which highlights [for me] a remaining
> ongoing incoherency:
>
>     I am not saying that this is everything people mean by
>     "subjective" and "objective", just pointing to one aspect
>     of the concept.  One might summarize this aspect
>     thus:  "If you can change something by thinking
>     differently, it's subjective; if you can't change it by
>     anything you do strictly inside your head, it's objective."

Jef, it doesn't seem like an incoherency. Here you are saying that you 
have been 'virtually productive' -- in that you haven't really been 
there doing stuff -- and yet you pair this with an 'incoherency' of 
changing something outside of your head but you have "done virtually 
nothing" with all of the puns and struggles of parsing that comes with 
my sentence.

- Bryan
________________________________________
http://heybryan.org/
Engineers: http://heybryan.org/exp.html
irc.freenode.net #hplusroadmap
"Genius is the ability to escape the human condition;
Humanity is the need to escape." -- Q. Uim



More information about the extropy-chat mailing list