“If you don’t see where this is going, then you haven’t read Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, which makes you incomplete as a human being.”
-- Eliezer Yudkowsky
Rune
Karma: 379
“The strength of a theory is not what it allows, but what it prohibits; if you can invent an equally persuasive explanation for any outcome, you have zero knowledge.”
-- Eliezer Yudkowsky
“If two men are fighting and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant, and she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts, you shall cut off her hand. Show her no pity.”
-- Deuteronomy 25:11-12 (New International Version)
“If you’ve never missed a flight, you’re spending too much time in airports.”
-- Umesh Vazirani (as quoted by Scott Aaronson)
“As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life—so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.”
-- M. Cartmill
“It’s hard to argue with a counter-example.”
-- Roger Brockett
So every possible economic status increases the priors of being religious. Wait, that can’t be right.
Increase the priors? Compared to what?
Can you give a detailed numerical examples of some problem where the Bayesian and Frequentist give different answers, and you feel strongly that the Frequentist’s answer is better somehow?
I think you’ve tried to do that, but I don’t fully understand most of your examples. Perhaps if you used numbers and equations, that would help a lot of people understand your point. Maybe expand on your “And here’s an ultra-short example of what frequentists can do” idea?
Agreed. I would also conjecture that a very large fraction of Rationalists will not tell them to pull the trigger. Integrity and honor are not very useful when you’re dead.
Moreover, the fact that one is an atheist is excellent when being forcefully converted to a different religion. There is no sky-Dawkins watching over atheists who will be angered by this conversion.
Why? Regardless of his strategy, you do no worse by switching.
Can chess be a game of luck?
I was just going to say the same thing. Gambler’s Fallacy is a nice name too.
Excellent post. We need more posts on this topic. The best rationalists I know are single and lonely. They’re holding out for a strong female rationalist, I presume.
Would be excellent! I’m sure EY and SA could find a large set of topics on which they disagree.
Also seconded. Considering Scott’s humorous remark (http://scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=328) to rename his blog to “Wallowing in Bias” and respond to OB posts!
“We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.”
-- H. L. Mencken
“If you understand something in only one way, then you do not really understand it at all.” —Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind
“There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.” —Edward Abbey
“Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different.” —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Ignorance exists in the map, not in the territory. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my own state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself.”
-- Eliezer Yudkowsky