Edit: How in the world did people miss the sarcasm in this? Do I need to end the post with “/s”?
Card carrying rationalist here. I had always been puzzled by the statement “We’re very big fans of Bayes Theorem” on the LW’s “about” page, until I saw the Standard Bayesian solution to the Raven Paradox … Its beautiful factual elegance moved me to tears. I never knew looking at apples had anything to do with ascertaining the colors of ravens until then. It was as if a whole new world of appleravens and ravenapples opened up in front of my mind’s eye! This epiphany is just too great not to share, even with my worst enemies here. Regards!
It’s not the Bayes theorem that’s getting sneered at, it’s the LARPing that rationalists do. People who would completely bomb any decent exam involving probabilities, doing their whole Bayes talk. “Updating my priors” alone is highly sneerworthy.
Take the typical rationalist exchange:
Alice: I don’t believe X is true.
Bob, whose only profession is arguing that X is true: Here’s some weak argument that X is true
Alice: All right I still don’t believe X but now I update my priors and give it higher probability.
You all don’t even know enough math to see anything wrong with the above. No I won’t spell it out for you for 10th time. Just try to put down on paper what the probabilities in the Bayes formula would correspond to in this verbal example. E.g. the probability of hearing a weak argument in support of X from a person making a living off X given that X is false.
edit:TL;DR; Like imagine some people went around with a=pi*r^2 as their mascot for some fucking reason in the 21th fucking century, and posting about how they once saw a wheel and its beautiful engineering elegance moved them to tears.
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I have no issue with observing a non black object that isn’t a raven being evidence that all ravens are black. It’s just terribly weak evidence, as noted on the wikipedia page. So weak that it is useless and not worth considering.
This raven thing seems much better to me than the completely made up “probabilities” rationalists pull out of…somewhere.
more broadly, it is literally impossible for a human to do Bayesian epistemology. Because the equation is presented as single numbers, when actually each term is a distribution, i.e. a matrix. Ain’t nobody doing that shit in real time.
also, from here previously: 4 Easy Ways To Lie With Bayes’ Rule And Call It Rationality
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If you feel that some random people on the internet - whom you’ve never met, and likely never will - are somehow your “worst enemies”, and that you need to go out of your way to defend your most precious beliefs against them - whether those beliefs are in the ‘raven paradox’, Christmas, or your personal lord and savior Jesus Christ - then I’m sorry to say, but you’re in a cult.
Jerry Schwarz, Emily Post for Usenet, 1983
Calvin’s Mom, 1992
I was legitimately wondering whether this was satire but given your comments, unfortunately not.
First of, Bayes theorem is just a routine application of a result from conditional probability. That is P(A∩B) = P(A|B) P(B). So we, trivially, obtain P(A|B) P(B) = P(A∩B) = P(B∩A) = P(B|A)P(A).
For a mathematician, this isn’t at all any beautiful or anything, in-fact it doesn’t even deserve a name. This literally just follows from the definition of a conditional probability. Of course, the real marvellous idea that is lurking behind is the existence of conditional probability. Why would something like P(B|A) exist in the first place for a continuous random variable? That part requires some beautiful mathematics, especially key ideas from measure theory; specifically the Radon-Nikodym theorem for absolutely continuous signed-measures.
This is why it is hard to take a lot of self-proclaimed rationalists seriously; like the things you guys end up finding beautiful are the most trivial stuff provided one understands the definitions of terms involved. This further makes one suspect about the claim of “beautiful factual elegance”. It is like hearing a 5 year old say “Wowww 1 + 1 = 2 so 2 + 2 = 4”.
Now you might counter back saying that it is not the Bayes theorem you liked but the application to Raven’s paradox, to which I will counter: why exactly is Raven’s paradox so significant to you that things become beautiful by virtue of being a solution?
It is understandable if you were a philosopher who had been grappling with the ideas of evidence and reasoning since birth but in that case, you must be able to realise that there isn’t anything important being added by the Bayes theorem here in the solution: it just provides a probabilistic framework to formalise some solution, the theorem itself isn’t a solution.
OP is consistently refusing to take the L and move on. Sounds like a Rationalist to me.
Personally, I find this “paradox” extremely stupid. It’s obviously at least mildly interesting to formal logicians, but as a layperson my response is basically “were you just hit in the head or something?” An elegant solution to a stupid paradox doesn’t exist.
Anyways, the issues with bayes isn’t that it’s bad. The issue is people making up numbers and pretending that they mean anything. You’re not a spam filter, you don’t process beliefs in statistical terms no matter how much you might pretend to the contrary.
yes, but what does the card say and where did you get it?
They should rename it the timewasting paradox. Spending time observing the wrong thing, where you don’t know the total number of possible observations of the correct thing and thus stamping meaningless numbers on the whole thing.
Is this a really bad joke or not