Thanks for reminding me! This seems to be another contradiction in Eliezer’s views that he hasn’t quite resolved. Beautiful Probability:
And then there’s the Bayesian reply: “Excuse you? The evidential impact of a fixed experimental method, producing the same data, depends on the researcher’s private thoughts? And you have the nerve to accuse us of being ‘too subjective’?”
When someone says, “The 4th coinflip came up heads”, we are not conditioning on the 4th coinflip having come up heads—we are not taking the subset of all possible worlds where the 4th coinflip came up heads—rather we are conditioning on the subset of all possible worlds where a speaker following some particular algorithm said “The 4th coinflip came up heads.” The spoken sentence is not the fact itself; don’t be led astray by the mere meanings of words.
I think these opinions contradict each other because the stopping rule of the experiment, which Eliezer claimed to be irrelevant in the first example, may act as the “clever arguer” from the second example. I have no idea which of these two opinions is correct. In statistics, this is known as the debate about the likelihood principle.
Thanks for reminding me! This seems to be another contradiction in Eliezer’s views that he hasn’t quite resolved. Beautiful Probability:
What Evidence Filtered Evidence:
I think these opinions contradict each other because the stopping rule of the experiment, which Eliezer claimed to be irrelevant in the first example, may act as the “clever arguer” from the second example. I have no idea which of these two opinions is correct. In statistics, this is known as the debate about the likelihood principle.