This makes me think that you’re (mostly) arguing against ‘Bayesianism’, i.e. effectively requesting that we ‘taboo’ that term and discuss its components (“tenets”) separately.
This is not an unreasonable criticism, but it feels slightly off. I am not arguing against having a bunch of components which we put together into a philosophy with a label; e.g. liberalism is a bunch of different components which get lumped together, and that’s fine. I am arguing that the current way that the tenets of bayesianism are currently combined is bad, because there’s this assumption that they are a natural cluster of ideas that can be derived from the mathematics of Bayes’ rule. It’s specifically discarding this assumption that I think is helpful. Then we could still endorse most of the same ideas as before, but add more in which didn’t have any link to bayes’ rule, and stop privileging bayesianism as a tool for thinking about AI. (We’d also want a new name for this cluster, I guess; perhaps reasonism? Sounds ugly now, but we’d get used to it).
This is not an unreasonable criticism, but it feels slightly off. I am not arguing against having a bunch of components which we put together into a philosophy with a label; e.g. liberalism is a bunch of different components which get lumped together, and that’s fine. I am arguing that the current way that the tenets of bayesianism are currently combined is bad, because there’s this assumption that they are a natural cluster of ideas that can be derived from the mathematics of Bayes’ rule. It’s specifically discarding this assumption that I think is helpful. Then we could still endorse most of the same ideas as before, but add more in which didn’t have any link to bayes’ rule, and stop privileging bayesianism as a tool for thinking about AI. (We’d also want a new name for this cluster, I guess; perhaps reasonism? Sounds ugly now, but we’d get used to it).