Please reply to this comment if you have feedback other than intent to participate, such as ideas on what would make a book club / study group process a satisfactory experience for you.
I think most of the “proof these are unique/sufficient” bits in the first IIRC couple chapters are quite unnecessary to your goals and just make it look like you need more mathematical expertise than you really do. So don’t get bogged down by that.
Some attention to the mathematical prerequisites needed to properly get through Jaynes might be nice. I’ve basically got some poorly learned undergraduate math, practically no calculus above high-school level and a pretty hand-wavy understanding of probability theory. I think the undergrad probability course I took said that proper treatment of probability axioms requires measure theoretic calculus, so it will be dealt with in a later course. I know pretty much nothing about measure theory beyond it having something to do with both calculus and probability theory. So stuff that assumes good calculus literacy might be anything from hard going to impossible to understand properly without further study.
Good point, I’ll try and see what I can tell of the prerequisites. I’ve made it through to Chapter 6 with extremely rusty high-school math and found it accessible if demanding. But it’s possible I’ve missed out deeper nuances due to lacking some background.
I appreciate your use of and linking to my scale for rating understanding. But in the few months until it becomes a universally recognized standard ;-) , you should probably briefly explain any reference to the numbered levels.
In this case, given the subject matter, “between levels 0 and 1” means that you can sometimes, but not always, generate the Bayesian answer to a given problem.
Please reply to this comment if you have feedback other than intent to participate, such as ideas on what would make a book club / study group process a satisfactory experience for you.
I think most of the “proof these are unique/sufficient” bits in the first IIRC couple chapters are quite unnecessary to your goals and just make it look like you need more mathematical expertise than you really do. So don’t get bogged down by that.
Some attention to the mathematical prerequisites needed to properly get through Jaynes might be nice. I’ve basically got some poorly learned undergraduate math, practically no calculus above high-school level and a pretty hand-wavy understanding of probability theory. I think the undergrad probability course I took said that proper treatment of probability axioms requires measure theoretic calculus, so it will be dealt with in a later course. I know pretty much nothing about measure theory beyond it having something to do with both calculus and probability theory. So stuff that assumes good calculus literacy might be anything from hard going to impossible to understand properly without further study.
Good point, I’ll try and see what I can tell of the prerequisites. I’ve made it through to Chapter 6 with extremely rusty high-school math and found it accessible if demanding. But it’s possible I’ve missed out deeper nuances due to lacking some background.
I’m wondering if this site might be of use for this: http://curiousreef.com/
Looks like it might provide a good alternate venue if it ever becomes cumbersome to have our discussions on LW.
I appreciate your use of and linking to my scale for rating understanding. But in the few months until it becomes a universally recognized standard ;-) , you should probably briefly explain any reference to the numbered levels.
In this case, given the subject matter, “between levels 0 and 1” means that you can sometimes, but not always, generate the Bayesian answer to a given problem.
I’d love to participate in this type of group in the future.