> The post feels like a fully general argument against Bayesianism, probabilities, and reasoning (about novel situations) in general.
I don’t think I am directly arguing against Bayesianism in the post. I think that Bayesianism is underspecified when it comes to where to get your priors from, and I wanted to make the weaker claim that this isn’t a particularly good way of informing your priors and can lead to overconfidence.
> People do disagree about the territory though?? The claim that people’s disagreement is merely semantic is shocking, it requires examples.
Yep, this perhaps wasn’t phrased very well. I was trying to express my frustration at a particular kind of disagreement I’ve seen where people have different models and the disagreement boils down to “ah but my model says this” without actually having much evidence that would distinguish the two models. People are disagreeing about the territory here, but filtered through different models, which sometimes they fail to recognise, and results in less productive disagreement.
Hey, thanks for your comment.
> The post feels like a fully general argument against Bayesianism, probabilities, and reasoning (about novel situations) in general.
I don’t think I am directly arguing against Bayesianism in the post. I think that Bayesianism is underspecified when it comes to where to get your priors from, and I wanted to make the weaker claim that this isn’t a particularly good way of informing your priors and can lead to overconfidence.
> People do disagree about the territory though?? The claim that people’s disagreement is merely semantic is shocking, it requires examples.
Yep, this perhaps wasn’t phrased very well. I was trying to express my frustration at a particular kind of disagreement I’ve seen where people have different models and the disagreement boils down to “ah but my model says this” without actually having much evidence that would distinguish the two models. People are disagreeing about the territory here, but filtered through different models, which sometimes they fail to recognise, and results in less productive disagreement.