I certainly didn’t mean to exclude circular justification: we know that evolution is true because of the empirical and theoretical evidence, which relies on us being able to trust our senses and reasoning, and the reason we can mostly trust our senses and reasoning is because evolution puts some pressure on organisms to have good senses and reasoning.
Maybe what you are saying is useful for an AI but for humans I think the concept of “I don’t have a belief about that” is more useful than making up a number with absolutely no justification just so that you won’t get Dutch booked. I think evolution deals with Dutch books in other ways (like making us reluctant to gamble) and so it’s not necessary to deal with that issue explicitly most of the time.
I agree. The concept of “belief” comes apart into different notions in such cases; like, we might explicitly say “I don’t have a belief about that” and we might internally be unable to summon any arguments one way or another, but we might find ourselves making decisions nonetheless.
I do think this is somewhat relevant for humans rather than only AI, though. If we find ourselves paralyzed and unable to act because we are unable to form a belief, we will end up doing nothing, which in many cases will be worse that things we would have done had we assigned any probability at all. Needing to make decisions is a more powerful justification for needing probabilities than Dutch books are.
I certainly didn’t mean to exclude circular justification: we know that evolution is true because of the empirical and theoretical evidence, which relies on us being able to trust our senses and reasoning, and the reason we can mostly trust our senses and reasoning is because evolution puts some pressure on organisms to have good senses and reasoning.
Maybe what you are saying is useful for an AI but for humans I think the concept of “I don’t have a belief about that” is more useful than making up a number with absolutely no justification just so that you won’t get Dutch booked. I think evolution deals with Dutch books in other ways (like making us reluctant to gamble) and so it’s not necessary to deal with that issue explicitly most of the time.
I agree. The concept of “belief” comes apart into different notions in such cases; like, we might explicitly say “I don’t have a belief about that” and we might internally be unable to summon any arguments one way or another, but we might find ourselves making decisions nonetheless.
I do think this is somewhat relevant for humans rather than only AI, though. If we find ourselves paralyzed and unable to act because we are unable to form a belief, we will end up doing nothing, which in many cases will be worse that things we would have done had we assigned any probability at all. Needing to make decisions is a more powerful justification for needing probabilities than Dutch books are.