You have an idea of how likely something is to happen, or an estimate of a figure, or a model of something in the real world (e.g: Peter is a guy who loves cats). You happen to get new information about this something (e.g: you see Peter viciously killing a cute kitten).
You’d most likely update, with both epistemical consequences (you’d probably stop believing Peter is the cat-loving guy you thought) and instrumental or practical consequences (you wouldn’t ask him to look after your cats while you are away on holiday).
The way I see it, Bayes’ Theorem tells you how much you should update your beliefs to take into account all the evidence you have, to be right as much of the time as possible, given the limited information you have.
Obviously, as they say about information systems in general, “garbage in garbage out”, which means you should worry about getting reliable information on the things you care most about, because even with the best possible update algorithm, if the information you get is biased, your beliefs and actions will not be right.
I don’t know if your criticism of the importance attached to Bayes’ Theorem is because you feel other aspects are neglected or what exactly is your rant. Could you please elaborate a bit?
You have an idea of how likely something is to happen, or an estimate of a figure, or a model of something in the real world (e.g: Peter is a guy who loves cats). You happen to get new information about this something (e.g: you see Peter viciously killing a cute kitten). You’d most likely update, with both epistemical consequences (you’d probably stop believing Peter is the cat-loving guy you thought) and instrumental or practical consequences (you wouldn’t ask him to look after your cats while you are away on holiday). The way I see it, Bayes’ Theorem tells you how much you should update your beliefs to take into account all the evidence you have, to be right as much of the time as possible, given the limited information you have. Obviously, as they say about information systems in general, “garbage in garbage out”, which means you should worry about getting reliable information on the things you care most about, because even with the best possible update algorithm, if the information you get is biased, your beliefs and actions will not be right. I don’t know if your criticism of the importance attached to Bayes’ Theorem is because you feel other aspects are neglected or what exactly is your rant. Could you please elaborate a bit?