Do you think it’s necessary for a person to understand Traditional Rationality as a mode of thinking before they can appreciate Bayes?
Good question! I think it should be possible to start with Bayes, but I’ve never seen it done. Lessons on Traditional Rationality appeal to built-in human intuitions, like “Reality is either a certain way or it’s not”, so you’d appeal to the same intuitions but use them to introduce probability principles like “Your probabilities shouldn’t sum to more than 1.0.”
I would be interested to hear what other members of the community think about this. I accidentally found Bayes after being trained as a physicist, which is not entirely unlike traditional rationality. But I want to teach my brother, who doesn’t have any science or rationality background. Has anyone had success with starting at Bayes and going from there?
Do you think it’s necessary for a person to understand Traditional Rationality as a mode of thinking before they can appreciate Bayes?
Good question! I think it should be possible to start with Bayes, but I’ve never seen it done. Lessons on Traditional Rationality appeal to built-in human intuitions, like “Reality is either a certain way or it’s not”, so you’d appeal to the same intuitions but use them to introduce probability principles like “Your probabilities shouldn’t sum to more than 1.0.”
Is this what CFAR is trying to do?
I would be interested to hear what other members of the community think about this. I accidentally found Bayes after being trained as a physicist, which is not entirely unlike traditional rationality. But I want to teach my brother, who doesn’t have any science or rationality background. Has anyone had success with starting at Bayes and going from there?