I may be the only one of my kind here, but I know absolutely nothing about probabilistic reasoning (I am envious of all you Bayesians and assume you’re right about everything. Down with the frequentists!); thus, I think Jaynes would be too far over my head. Maybe there’s a dichotomy between philosophy / psychology / highschool Lesswrongers and computer science / physics / math Lesswrongers that make the group of people at Jaynes-level a small group.
You’re not the only one. I’m not bad at math and logic, but very rusty, and almost completely uneducated when it comes to probabilities. (Oddly enough, the junior high school I went to did offer a probabilities course—to the students who were in the track below me. We who tested highest were given trigonometry a year earlier, instead.)
You might be right about the divide, too—I’m more in the former category than the latter, for all that I’m a programmer, and it doesn’t seem like I’d have much opportunity to use the math even if I took the time to learn it, so there’s very little motivation for me to do so.
I may be the only one of my kind here, but I know absolutely nothing about probabilistic reasoning (I am envious of all you Bayesians and assume you’re right about everything. Down with the frequentists!); thus, I think Jaynes would be too far over my head. Maybe there’s a dichotomy between philosophy / psychology / highschool Lesswrongers and computer science / physics / math Lesswrongers that make the group of people at Jaynes-level a small group.
You’re not the only one. I’m not bad at math and logic, but very rusty, and almost completely uneducated when it comes to probabilities. (Oddly enough, the junior high school I went to did offer a probabilities course—to the students who were in the track below me. We who tested highest were given trigonometry a year earlier, instead.)
You might be right about the divide, too—I’m more in the former category than the latter, for all that I’m a programmer, and it doesn’t seem like I’d have much opportunity to use the math even if I took the time to learn it, so there’s very little motivation for me to do so.