I suspect that you are leaping to the idea of “infinite regress” much too quickly, and also failing to look past it or try to simply “patch” the regress in a practical way when you say:
Evaluating the efficiency of a given prior distribution will be done over the course of several experiments, and hence requires a higher order prior distribution (a prior distribution over prior distributions). Infinite regress.
Basically, if you stack your distributions two or three (or heaven forbid four) layers deep, you will get a LOT of expressiveness and yet the number of steps up the abstraction hierarchy still can be counted with the fingers of one hand. Within only a few thousand experiments even the topmost of your distributions will probably start acquiring a bit of shape that usefully informs subsequent experiments.
Probably part of the reason you seem to give up at the first layer of recursion and just assume that it will recurse unproductively forever is that you’re thinking in terms of some small number of slogans (axioms?) that can be culturally transmitted in language by relatively normal people engaging in typical speech patterns, perhaps reporting high church Experiments that took weeks or months or years to perform, and get reported in a peer reviewed journal and so on.
Rather than conceptually center this academic practice, perhaps it would make more sense to think of “beliefs” as huge catalogues of microfacts, often subverbal, and “experiments” as being performed by even normal humans on the time scales of milliseconds to minutes?
The remarkable magical thing about humans is not that we can construct epistemies, the remarkable thing is that humans can walk, make eye contact and learn things from it, feed ourselves, and pick up sticks to wave around in a semi-coordinated fashion. This requires enormous amounts of experimentation, and once you start trying to build them from scratch yourself you realize the models involved here are astonishing feats of cognitive engineering.
Formal academic science is hilariously slow by comparison to babies.
The problems formal intellectual processes solve is not the problem of figuring things out quickly and solidly, but rather (among other things) the problem of lots of people independently figuring out many of the same things in different orders with different terminology and ending up with the problem of Babel.
Praise be to Azathoth, for evolution already solved “being able to learn stuff pretty good” on its own and delivered this gift to each of us as a birthright. The thing left to us to to solve something like the “political economy of science”. Credit assignment. Re-work. Economies of scale… (In light of social dynamics, Yvain’s yearly predictions start to make a lot more sense.)
I suspect that you are leaping to the idea of “infinite regress” much too quickly, and also failing to look past it or try to simply “patch” the regress in a practical way when you say
No. I mention the practical patch right after : epistemies.
The remarkable magical thing about humans is not that we can construct epistemies, the remarkable thing is that humans can walk, make eye contact and learn things from it, feed ourselves, and pick up sticks to wave around in a semi-coordinated fashion.
Formal academic science is hilariously slow by comparison to babies.
Those are two different fields, with different problems. My answer to your thing is that we have embedded epistemological/ontological when we are born. From a different line of comments :
However, let’s say we consider naive observation and innate reasoning as being part of a proto-epistemy. Then we have to acknowledge too that we have a fair-share of embedded ontological knowledge that we don’t gain through experience, but that we have when we are born. (Time, space, multiplicity, weight, etc.).
This is paramount, as without that, we would actually be trapped in infinite regress.
The problems formal intellectual processes solve is not the problem of figuring things out quickly and solidly
Well, formal verification, proof systems, NLP and AGI are a thing. So I disagree.
The thing left to us to to solve something like the “political economy of science”.
No, there are plenty of other things. Including the aforementioned one. But more primary is fixing the “gift as a birthright”. That’s the point of rationalism. Our innate epistemy is a bad one. It lets us walk, gather sticks and talk with people, but it makes for bad science most of the time.
I suspect that you are leaping to the idea of “infinite regress” much too quickly, and also failing to look past it or try to simply “patch” the regress in a practical way when you say:
Consider the uses that the Dirichlet distribution is classically put to...
Basically, if you stack your distributions two or three (or heaven forbid four) layers deep, you will get a LOT of expressiveness and yet the number of steps up the abstraction hierarchy still can be counted with the fingers of one hand. Within only a few thousand experiments even the topmost of your distributions will probably start acquiring a bit of shape that usefully informs subsequent experiments.
Probably part of the reason you seem to give up at the first layer of recursion and just assume that it will recurse unproductively forever is that you’re thinking in terms of some small number of slogans (axioms?) that can be culturally transmitted in language by relatively normal people engaging in typical speech patterns, perhaps reporting high church Experiments that took weeks or months or years to perform, and get reported in a peer reviewed journal and so on.
Rather than conceptually center this academic practice, perhaps it would make more sense to think of “beliefs” as huge catalogues of microfacts, often subverbal, and “experiments” as being performed by even normal humans on the time scales of milliseconds to minutes?
The remarkable magical thing about humans is not that we can construct epistemies, the remarkable thing is that humans can walk, make eye contact and learn things from it, feed ourselves, and pick up sticks to wave around in a semi-coordinated fashion. This requires enormous amounts of experimentation, and once you start trying to build them from scratch yourself you realize the models involved here are astonishing feats of cognitive engineering.
Formal academic science is hilariously slow by comparison to babies.
The problems formal intellectual processes solve is not the problem of figuring things out quickly and solidly, but rather (among other things) the problem of lots of people independently figuring out many of the same things in different orders with different terminology and ending up with the problem of Babel.
Praise be to Azathoth, for evolution already solved “being able to learn stuff pretty good” on its own and delivered this gift to each of us as a birthright. The thing left to us to to solve something like the “political economy of science”. Credit assignment. Re-work. Economies of scale… (In light of social dynamics, Yvain’s yearly predictions start to make a lot more sense.)
A useful keyword here is “social epistemology” and a good corpus of material is the early work of Kevin Zollman, including this overview defending the conceptual utility of social epistemology as a field.
No. I mention the practical patch right after : epistemies.
Those are two different fields, with different problems. My answer to your thing is that we have embedded epistemological/ontological when we are born. From a different line of comments :
Well, formal verification, proof systems, NLP and AGI are a thing. So I disagree.
No, there are plenty of other things. Including the aforementioned one. But more primary is fixing the “gift as a birthright”. That’s the point of rationalism. Our innate epistemy is a bad one. It lets us walk, gather sticks and talk with people, but it makes for bad science most of the time.
Thanks for the pointer. Checking it.