Why can’t a frequentist say: “Bayesians are conflating probability with subjective degree of belief.” ? They were here first after all.
Probability does model frequency, and it does model subjective degree of believe, and this is not a contradiction. Using the copula is the problem, obviously: if subjective degree of believe is not frequency, and probability is frequency, then probability is not subjective degree of belief. Analogously, if subjective degree of believe is not frequency, and probability is subjective degree of belief, then probability is not frequency.
The problem is that they all conflate “probability” with “subjective degree of belief” and “frequency”, the bayesian conflates subjective degree of belief and probability. The frequentist conflates probability and frequency.
The frequentist/Bayesian dispute is of real import, because ad-hoc frequentist statistical methods often break down in extreme cases, throw away useful data, only work well with Gaussian sampling distributions etc.
The debate over whether to use Bayesian methods or frequentest methods is of import. I think potato was trying to say this here:
How we should actually model the situation as a probability distribution depends on our goal. But remember that Bayesianism is the stronger magic.
But the question of whether probability is frequency, or if probability is subjective degree of belief, is just as silly as a dispute over whether numbers are quantity, or if they are orders. The answer is that numbers model both, and are neither.
Hello I am a philosophy student in north Jersey. I’m 20 years old, and am very familiar with LW and the sequences. I’ve been reading LW now for about a year, and it has completely changed my life. I am very grateful to Eliezer and all of you for letting me have my Bayesian enlightenment at 20. When I first read the twelve virtues my life changed forever. I am definitely one of those that considers the sequences to be one of the most important works i have read, at least as far as having a personal influence.
I want to work on the hard questions of philosophy, grue and induction, cognition and consciousness, nominalism v.s. realism, Bayesian epistemology, philosophy of probability and mathematics in general, and even meta-physics, though I would like to positivize the field a bit. What I want to do as a philosopher is find problems/paradoxes/questions which fascinate me, and use rationality to solve them. “Solve” being the key word there. I think LW has done a lot to pursue many those goals, which seem strictly like philosophical goals. It seems to me, that LW should go full force and treat itself as a philosophical movement, conveniently primarily concerned with systematically becoming less wrong. Yes, there are mathematicians, and AI designers, and physicists, and psychologists among us, but that is how it should be in any modern philosophical movement.
I have given myself some primer time to become familiar with your terminology, content, and techniques. I now want to use these techniques to solve problems on paper and share the solutions with you. I am doing this because I expect that this will let me know how I am doing so far, and where I need to improve.
Lastly, I would like to ask, how does less wrong see itself? I mean what is the general LW opinion of what LW is? Is it a blog? An open source research institute? A philosophical movement? A non-philosophical movement? A self-help movement? I am curious.