What would be the formal qualifications for a claim like this? I've taken fairly advanced probability classes in a statistics department, and this is definitely not the sort of thing they cover. I know philosophy of probability is a research topic in philosophy departments, but it's quite niche.
I think you're conflating uncertainty in estimating a parameter or measuring a quantity (error bars) and uncertainty in your probability estimate for an event. It's roughly the difference between "I am 95% confident my interval contains the true value" and "I am uncertain about whether that 95% confidence is appropriate."
I don't think I am, but even if that were the case, both of those options clearly demonstrate the existence *of what I would call an "uncertain probability"
Uncertainty of probability estimates definitely crops up before "fairly advanced probability classes in a statistics department."
For an example, have you ever seen [this formula](https://www.google.com/search?q=z+test+for+proportions&sxsrf=APq-WBszHKLZHZdH7QDW9kxWw4LJkQul7A:1648317427750&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&vet=1&fir=gsd6EgJu2aQiHM%252ChMl3FWqFsCYofM%252C_%253BTWa4BPM71TvSYM%252CepGxKKztBWtjPM%252C_&usg=AI4_-kQTxkrfIIINNhbMeoFHS43Toj8cfg&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiH6Yf2rOT2AhX3IjQIHXj6DWYQ_h16BAgYEAE&biw=1374&bih=758&dpr=2.2#imgrc=gsd6EgJu2aQiHM)
Yes, of course I have, but this is not at all what the original post was about.
This is a test for comparing proportions in two populations: Is there a difference between the percentage of Americans and Canadians who own a car?
The post was about uncertainty in (subjective?) probabilities: How confident am I that there is a 1% chance Russia will use a nuclear weapon?
It's actually quite related, but let me see if I can break it down.
In the frequentist mindframe, we can think of there as being two quantities: the sample proportion and the "true" population probability. Our sample proportion is derived from empirical evidence/our knowledge and attempts to estimate the "true" population probability. You can view the Twitter posters' probability (if they were to give one) as an estimate of the "true" population probability (ie. if we were to play back this world a large number of times, the amount of times it broke out into nuclear war would approach this probability). That estimate can absolutely have uncertainty associated with it.
Now, frequentism is dumb - but uncertainty of probability estimates is even more fundamental in the Bayesian context.
The student asking the question is you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZ3LC0XdgsA
Right?
If not I would love it if you went to one of his talks and asked him about his formal qualifications. Then millions of people would get to enjoy the sight.
:)
I literally have no idea who you are other than that you moderate this sub. Just found it ridiculous how your whole response is no, because no formal qualifications. I hope you learned something from the Ben Shapiro video because if you say that in public you may end up looking like the fool.
I saw that you mentioned Ben Shapiro. In case some of you don't know, Ben Shapiro is a grifter and a hack. If you find anything he's said compelling, you should keep in mind he also says things like this:
> Palestinian Arabs have demonstrated their preference for suicide bombing over working toilets.
*****
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No comment ‘cos that’s a Ben Shapiro video.
As I say elsewhere in the comments under here I know what he’s getting at, but he’s so far off the mark for what he’s actually commenting on it’s laughable.
I saw that you mentioned Ben Shapiro. In case some of you don't know, Ben Shapiro is a grifter and a hack. If you find anything he's said compelling, you should keep in mind he also says things like this:
>Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage. This is not a difficult issue.
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>what does he think uncertainty is
Nothing. And I mean this unironically: all the appeal of the rabbithole he dumped himself into depends on the idea that nothing is truly uncertain and you just have to apply some weird trick (that are easy enought to be conveyed without any difficult math but deep enough that all those know-it-all in academia missed them) to get the unambigously correct answer.
In a sense it is interesting how Yud managed to combine the appeal of vulgar exoterism with the ones of vulgar esoterism.
To be fair, anything above the quantum scale is deterministic. You just need to be a perfect calculator, know every single law of physics, and be omniscient. Easy.
I think he's saying that if you know what an event is and does, then it should always be possible to calculate probabilities.
Which may even be somewhat true, but in a good show of his empathic skills and mental flexibility that wasn't the point here.
It's not *literally* that "estimating is impossible". It's just that you have such an ludicrously ginormous range (given from the intertwining of hundreds of other very aleatory events) that it's as well only an useless waste of time.
i know you're being facetious, but the fact that you even have a P(A|B) that is not like.... the dirac delta function.. shows that you can be uncertain about probabilities.
Sad E.T. Jaynes noises. I guess the “probability of probability”
concept he used to explain the difference between a toss of a fair coin
and finding life on Mars didn’t catch on.
My statistics prof used "known unknowns and unkown unkowns", probably reminiscent of Bush Jr.. Still, impressive how he could dodge such a commonplace concept, on Twitter of all places
Another minor point this is iirc a fairly normal idea in intelligence (the spy kinds) and national security. That everybody laughed at him says more about us than him.
/u/nodying has it right, although you’re equally as right in that very quickly the apparent clumsiness of the phrase made it into just another bushism for people who weren’t aware that Rumsfeld was pointing to a real concept. It’s one of the earliest political storms I remember first hand, including the depressing backlash to the backlash, where hawks would mock anti-war protesters for mocking Rumsfeld, because in doing som they supposedly didn’t understand the term “unknown unknowns” and therefore couldn’t possibly understand national security, or the question of whether it was ok to kill innocent people in a war of adventure.
Veterans of /r/SneerClub will recognise the tactic of “if you can’t run a study yourself showing that the African brain isn’t genetically identical to that of a toothbrush, how can you criticise this study showing that it is from the Pioneer Fund?”
Yeah I just recall the antiwar backlash against him, so this is all very much coloured by my experiences at the time.
And yes the antiwar protesters were def in the right here. I do recall the massive antiwar protests even in my backwater town.
A term like 'thrust but verify' also has weird backlashes nowadays as it was adoubted by GG (and mentioned by some shit repub american president) even if it isnt a bad concept in theory (in practice however, it will be used selectively to go after minorities etc).
In my mind, it doesn't really make sense to talk about the probability of (I guess?) getting right a probability for a single event. It seems pretty redundant.
On the other hand, if you were talking about multiple events, I think some novel "overall" figure could have its use. If you are very confident in one, and not so much so in another, depending on their relative importance in the equation your final assessment could change in certainty.
This was from [Probability theory: The logic of science](https://books.google.pl/books/about/Probability_Theory.html?id=UjsgAwAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y), and the question was how the subjective probability should be updated after new observations. I really can't be arsed to dig out the specific part now, sorry. I only mentioned it because Yud recommended the book to his cult once, so I found it funny that apparently Roko isn't familiar.
It’s a big debate in the literature on the philosophy of probability
whether we can put error bars on probabilities (“the probability is
between 35 and 55 percent”) or whether the idea is incoherent because
the probability should already express all the certainty and uncertainty
in one figure. A friend used to be very into this topic before he
decided it was dead fucking boring.
As a subjectivist bayesian he should be well acquainted with the concept of uncertainties in probabilities as his models will have distributions over parameter values that represent subjective notions of how uncertain the statistician is with the parameters. Therefore, the statistician is uncertain about the best probabilities the model could assign to observations. Like, you don't even need error bars or imprecise probabilities to have uncertain probabilities.
Not a mathematician/statistician, but how is "the probability should already express all the certainty and uncertainty in one figure" even coherent?
If you have a 50% probability of a coin flip result coming in heads and a (for example) 30% probability that your estimate is bullshit bc the thing doesnt function like a coin flip at all, how would you condense that into a single number?
The first thing to understand about the philosophy of probability is that most philosophers of probability \[at least at my alma mater\]are subjectivists, in the sense that they think probability doesn't refer to anything in the world, it refers to a degree of belief. To say that something has a 50% probability of being true means, roughly speaking, that you believe it 50%.
So in this case we have to work out what your degree of belief should be that the coin will come up heads. Conditional on the 70% case that it comes up heads and tails 50/50 in the long run if it is flipped, your degree of belief should be 0.5 That's easy part, now we deal with the 30% case.
Well we know the long run frequency is NOT 50/50, but we have no information about which way it leans. Some philosophers of probability would say you can just pick whatever probability distribution you like here, but most would appeal to what is called the principle of equal ignorance- in the absence of information showing us which way the coin leans, we have no reason to believe one case over the other. Thus even in this 30% case where we know for sure the long run frequency won't be 50/50, our probability should still be 50/50, because it could just as easily go either way.
Hence ((0.5)\*0.7)+((0.5)\*0.3)=0.5
Hence, I would guess that most philosophers of probability would say that you should say the probability of the coin coming up heads is 50%, because based on the avaliable information you should 50% believe that it's going to come up heads.
I'd make a wild guess of how likely a weird bullshit non-coin is to be heads. Call that *p*, and then the chance of heads is .7(.5) + .3*p*.
IMO that's the optimal way to make bets individually, but a terrible way to communicate knowledge to anyone else. Guess that's why the cryp\*o crowd likes it.
>in the literature on the philosophy of probability
What? I've worked in applied probability-esque fields/bayesian statistics and literally nobody contests that you can have a posterior over probabilities.
I feel that if rationalists had their own wikipedia, like
rightwingers have conservapedia, the entry on “interpretations
of probability” would be one word long: “no”.
You are in luck, because [here is the "interpretations of probability" from RationalWiki.](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Probability#Interpretations_of_probability)
**[Probability interpretations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_interpretations)**
>The word probability has been used in a variety of ways since it was first applied to the mathematical study of games of chance. Does probability measure the real, physical, tendency of something to occur, or is it a measure of how strongly one believes it will occur, or does it draw on both these elements? In answering such questions, mathematicians interpret the probability values of probability theory. There are two broad categories of probability interpretations which can be called "physical" and "evidential" probabilities.
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Wild to see armscontrol twitter showing up here, though tbh arms
control twitter is basically a sneerclub for making fun of EMP crazies
and hypersonic hysteria.
(pauses screaming to provide a reference: chapter 7 of Persi Diaconis and Brian Skyrms' *Ten Great Ideas About Chance,* Princeton University Press, 2018)
Roko’s first clause is true in a myopic way, this is actually why
imprecise probabilities were invented:
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprecise_probability
is this a “water isn’t wet” thing? where probabilities can’t be
uncertain because they ARE uncertainty itself? Otherwise I can’t imagine
how this could possibly be a position someone could hold
[deleted]
If probabilities cant be uncertain, what does he think uncertainty is
right yea community that lords Bayes rule over everyone doesn’t understand Bayes rule at all lol
Sad E.T. Jaynes noises. I guess the “probability of probability” concept he used to explain the difference between a toss of a fair coin and finding life on Mars didn’t catch on.
Roko hates unknowns
Roko buys cryptocurrency
What a man of contrasts.
It’s a big debate in the literature on the philosophy of probability whether we can put error bars on probabilities (“the probability is between 35 and 55 percent”) or whether the idea is incoherent because the probability should already express all the certainty and uncertainty in one figure. A friend used to be very into this topic before he decided it was dead fucking boring.
I feel that if rationalists had their own wikipedia, like rightwingers have conservapedia, the entry on “interpretations of probability” would be one word long: “no”.
It’s a fight between ☮️ and (((pRobabIListIC ForEcAsTinG)))
Wild to see armscontrol twitter showing up here, though tbh arms control twitter is basically a sneerclub for making fun of EMP crazies and hypersonic hysteria.
(screams in de Finetti representation theorem)
Roko’s first clause is true in a myopic way, this is actually why imprecise probabilities were invented: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprecise_probability
This is dumb. Forecasting with unknown variables make for uncertain probabilities. He’s saying he doesn’t know how to forecast this problem.
wtf
Maybe he thinks the Mean Posterior probability is the only actual probability.
fuzzy logic === belly button logic
Probabilities are BECAUSE uncertainty; this hurt my brain to read.
Uncertainty can’t be uncertain
He couldn’t even finish his first sentence without looking like an idiot.
can we calculate the probability that a probability is certain?
is this a “water isn’t wet” thing? where probabilities can’t be uncertain because they ARE uncertainty itself? Otherwise I can’t imagine how this could possibly be a position someone could hold