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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   32647 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024

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People can claim to be good anything regardless of facts on the ground. Talk and unfounded claims are cheap and may even be free (ignoring opportunity costs).

I'd expect anyone who outright calls themselves a Bayesian to do better on that front.*

*Going off Bayesian priors about what the kind of people nerdy enough to have even heard of the idea are like, let alone self professed ones

I mean that the whole framework is designed so that you never end up having to eat crow. "My priors for this are very low. Oh, it happened anyway? Oh well, I promise to bump up my priors somewhat for the next time this non-repeatable event happens!".

Uh.. That's the worst way of reasoning from evidence that's ever been tried, barring all the others.

Absent logical omniscience, you are occasionally going to be wrong, and then you try to be less wrong. Taken deeply enough, no macroscopic events in the history of the universe are likely to ever be truly alike or repeatable, so sorting out reference classes is unavoidably important.

"I was wrong about World War 3 not happening. Well, we can't have a World War 3 2.0 happen for me to be right about, but at least I can adjust my priors for massive wars happening in the future".

Besides. You can very much eat crow when you are confidently wrong. It just takes intellectual honesty, and Bayesians at least pay lip service to the notion we learn from our mistakes. Keep being bad at updating, and people will stop considering what you say to be informative (and that's not unique to self-professed Bayesians, because in practise most humans apply the concepts implicitly, some are more disciplined and explicit than others).

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