“Why I’m not a Bayesian” by Richard_Ngo

This post focuses on philosophical objections to Bayesianism as an epistemology. I first explain Bayesianism and some standard objections to it, then lay out my two main objections (inspired by ideas in philosophy of science). A follow-up post will speculate about how to formalize an alternative.

Degrees of belief

The core idea of Bayesianism: we should ideally reason by assigning credences to propositions which represent our degrees of belief that those propositions are true.

If that seems like a sufficient characterization to you, you can go ahead and skip to the next section, where I explain my objections to it. But for those who want a more precise description of Bayesianism, and some existing objections to it, I’ll more specifically characterize it in terms of five subclaims. Bayesianism says that we should ideally reason in terms of:

1. Propositions which are either true or false (classical logic)
2. Each of [...]

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Outline:

(00:22) Degrees of belief

(04:06) Degrees of truth

(08:05) Model-based reasoning

(13:43) The role of Bayesianism

The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.

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First published:
October 6th, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TyusAoBMjYzGN3eZS/why-i-m-not-a-bayesian

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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