[ExI] Probability is "subjectively objective"

[Jef Allbright]

On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 11:14 AM, Bryan Bishop <kanzure at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Huh?

Bryan,

(1)  It appears that you have mixed my own comments with the twp
segments I quoted from Eliezer's blog post.

(2)  "puns and struggles of parsing that comes with my sentence" ?  Is
that intended to be a self-referential joke?  If so, consider yourself
reprieved.

- Jef