Yeah, I also have nontrivial odds on “something UDTish is more fundamental than Bayesian inference” / “there are no probabilities only values” these days :-)
Sorry, I meant to imply that my faith in UDT has been dropping a bit too, due to lack of progress on the question of whether the UDT-equivalent of the Bayesian prior just represents subjective values or should be based on something objective like whether some universes has more existence than others (i.e., the “reality fluid” view), and also lack of progress on creating a normative ideal for such a “prior”. (There seems to have been essentially no progress on these questions since “What Are Probabilities, Anyway?” was written about six years ago.)
I mostly agree here, though I’m probably less perturbed by the six year time gap. It seems to me like most of the effort in this space has been going towards figuring out how to handle logical uncertainty and logical counterfactuals (with some reason to believe that answers will bear on the question of how to generate priors), with comparatively little work going into things like naturalized induction that attack the problem of priors more directly.
Can you say any more about alternatives you’ve been considering? I can easily imagine a case where we look back and say “actually the entire problem was about generating a prior-like-thingy” but I have a harder time visualizing different tacts altogether (that don’t eventually have some step that reads “then treat observations like Bayesian evidence”).
Can you say any more about alternatives you’ve been considering?
Not much to say, unfortunately. I tried looking at some frequentist ideas for inspiration, but didn’t find anything that seemed to have much bearing on the kind of philosophical problems we’re trying to solve here.
Yeah, I also have nontrivial odds on “something UDTish is more fundamental than Bayesian inference” / “there are no probabilities only values” these days :-)
Sorry, I meant to imply that my faith in UDT has been dropping a bit too, due to lack of progress on the question of whether the UDT-equivalent of the Bayesian prior just represents subjective values or should be based on something objective like whether some universes has more existence than others (i.e., the “reality fluid” view), and also lack of progress on creating a normative ideal for such a “prior”. (There seems to have been essentially no progress on these questions since “What Are Probabilities, Anyway?” was written about six years ago.)
I mostly agree here, though I’m probably less perturbed by the six year time gap. It seems to me like most of the effort in this space has been going towards figuring out how to handle logical uncertainty and logical counterfactuals (with some reason to believe that answers will bear on the question of how to generate priors), with comparatively little work going into things like naturalized induction that attack the problem of priors more directly.
Can you say any more about alternatives you’ve been considering? I can easily imagine a case where we look back and say “actually the entire problem was about generating a prior-like-thingy” but I have a harder time visualizing different tacts altogether (that don’t eventually have some step that reads “then treat observations like Bayesian evidence”).
Not much to say, unfortunately. I tried looking at some frequentist ideas for inspiration, but didn’t find anything that seemed to have much bearing on the kind of philosophical problems we’re trying to solve here.