snarles

• snarles 11 Jun 2026 18:03 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Canaletto’s comment on: leogao’s Shortform

  > Do you actually have any uhh factual disagreements with atheists?

  Are you asking if there are any statements about the world where I am 100% certain, and where a large majority of atheists would be 100% certain of the negation of that statement? There are very few statements where I am 100% certain, so I can say the answer is no.

  EDIT:
  But I think you are asking this in response to my claims about the inadequacy of science. Science postulates entities which are not directly observed, but inferred from data, and uses the properties of those unobserved entities to make predictions about the future. It is with regards to these inferred entities and yet unconfirmed predictions where I think I would have the most disagreements with folks who base their worldviews on mainstream scientific consensus. However, this is not necessarily because of my theism. There are non-religious philosophers who are skeptical of how empiricism is deployed in science who would also disagree with either the predictions, or the confidence attached to those predictions, that follow from scientific consensus.

  The best example I can give of a domain where I might tend to disagree with scientific consensus is with regards to the placebo effect in medicine. The scientific consensus would probably be that there is some unknown causal chain between conscious thought and the low-level processes in the body related to healing and recovery. However, I think the effect is too strong to be explained by such hypothetical processes, and there must be some more direct causal mechanism between conscious thought and large-scale physical changes in the rest of the body.

  > Did all the stuff from Old Testament happened, or is it all weird and misleading metaphor?

  With regards to the Torah and biblical prophecies, I largely agree with Jordan Peterson’s view: stories in scripture are symbolic representations of patterns that have been distilled from countless other stories and people’s experience through untold generations. There are some books of the Bible, such as the books of Samuel and Chronicles, which are harder to interpret as metaphor—it seems there must have literally existed a King David.

  > Was Jesus a spellcaster or just an inspired guy with awesome ideas?

  If the Gospels portray actual history, I am not sure of the exact nature of Jesus’ miracles. In several cases, the success of the miracle is attributed to the beneficiaries’ faith. Also, Jesus’ opponents seem to be at such an extreme level of disbelief of public miracles that it is hard to attribute merely due to their ideological dislike of Jesus. Even Jesus disciples seem to have a strange amnesia of his recent miracles (Mark 8:19-21). My interpretation is that the scripture itself dissuades the reader from thinking that Jesus’ miracles were straightforward objective facts. My current speculation is that the strange nature of Jesus’ miracles is intended to point at the relationship between our supposedly objective reality and spiritual faith.

  > Did God micromanage the creation of humans or did he outsource it to a meatgrinder of evolution?

  My interpretation of Christian faith is that it can only be compatible with a God that exists not only outside of physical reality, but is not even governed by mathematical description—indeed, mathematical truth is created by God to suit His purposes. Evolutionary processes governed by mathematical laws are a faithful expression of God’s intent and not independent of His will. We cannot define miracles as God’s intervention in the natural order, because the natural order and supernatural miracles are both instigated by God. What we regard as miraculous seems to be more of an expression of our own subjective expectations, but God also takes that into consideration.

  Adopting such a transcendent view of God, in my view, also potentially resolves issues related to pre-determination. God already knows what each of us would have freely chosen (whatever that means) and then created the starting conditions of a deterministic universe so that the deterministic outcomes of the laws of the universe exactly replicate the choices that we would have made freely. Caveat 1: this is just a theological theory, not my current belief about God. Caveat 2: a lot of philosophical heavy-lifting is being done by the concept of “free choice” here which is not at all defined.

• snarles 9 Jun 2026 14:59 UTC

  9 points

  4

  in reply to: leogao’s comment on: leogao’s Shortform

  EDIT: I got some very useful feedback from my atheist friend and I’m reorganizing this post.
  
  Here it seems that your central point is that the reality of death is scary to confront from the perspective of your sincere atheism, and that you find it noble to confront your fear of this reality. Furthermore, you are angry at religious people who seem to have taken the easy way out by choosing to believe in lies rather than (a) take on the challenge of constructing meaning and (b) face the harsh truth of the finality of death, and who do not recognize your sacrifice in taking the harder road. You imply that science (as opposed to religion) is the best way of seeking truth.
  
  TL;DR. I think I’m an exception to your implication that all religious people have taken the easy way out, while still agreeing that this may be true for many of them. I essentially agree with your view that reality can be harsh and death is scary. I wonder if seeking the truth can be achieved purely through scientific thinking or whether religious teachings can be helpful if taken with discretion—which is my experience.

  My response is as follows:

  1) My personal feelings about your post

  2) My areas of agreement with you

  3) My doubt about finding communities to support truth-seekers

  3.5) My observations about open-mindedness within religion

  4) My doubt about the adequacy of human-derived scientific knowledge in removing all biases

  5) Things I don’t have time to write more about

  1) My personal feelings about your post
  
  I’m religious and I was triggered by this post. I don’t think I tried to take the easy road. I had a friend who claimed to be EMF-sensitive (electromagnetic field-sensitive) and I was trying to “scientifically” disprove his disease—doing sneaky experiments to see he if we really was bothered by wifi. Now I think that was a rather disrespectful thing to do, but that goes to show how much of a “militant” atheist I was. However, I agreed to join a yoga workshop from the Isha foundation because my friend claimed that I would believe him after the experience. Indeed, after 4 days, my worldview was not the same.

  If you read that, thank you! I didn’t say it to try to convince you that you’re wrong about religion—I know it’s very unlikely that my experience would be compelling to you, and I don’t have many reasons to care about what you believe.

  Also, apologies if you find that some of the following is poorly written or leaves out details. I have already spent 90 minutes writing this and I have to move on to some urgent tasks.

  2) My areas of agreement with you

  So now let me tell you all the ways I agree with you.

  • “the human condition involves a whole bunch of things that are kind of sucky.”

  • “it can be very difficult to find a source of meaning to ground our motivation in”

  • “the difficulty of connecting with other people despite differences”

  • “true solution to each of these problems...difficult never ending journey of discovery of the self.. part of the project of civilization should be to slowly build up the cultural edifice required to solve these problems.”

  • “religion” often functions as a “hacky patch that kind of helps...”

  • “religion” often causes one to “contort and utterly trash your epistemics”

  • “not everyone should embark on the difficult path of accepting nothing but the truth.”

  All agreed!

  And yet, despite the difficulties, I can wholeheartedly identify with you as someone who has tried to accept nothing but the truth.

  3) My doubt about finding communities to support truth-seekers

  However, the practical challenge of discerning the truth and fighting against the emotional and social gradients that oppose the truth is indeed difficult. I used to think that the LessWrong community or CFAR could be helpful for this task, but I’ve lost confidence in these communities. You can see that I rarely post here. Academia, I found, was also lacking in sincere truth-seekers. I went to Stanford for graduate school, and now I work at the National Institutes of Health.

  3.5) My observations about open-mindedness within religion

  I attend a protestant church, and I completely agree that most religious people are unfortunately very closed-minded. However, I believe that God also wants to help religious people become more open-minded, and He gradually leads people within traditional religions to expand their worldview. I can give you one interesting anecdote to chew on. As you probably know, the majority of Christians are quite dogmatic and believe that our faith is the only path to salvation. However, you can see several examples of prominent Christians who became more tolerant as they matured. Billy Graham is the example that stands out the most to me, as near the end of the life he was stated that he believed believers from other religions might also be saved:

  Well, Christianity and being a true believer—you know, I think there’s the Body of Christ. This comes from all the Christian groups around the world, outside the Christian groups. I think everybody that loves Christ, or knows Christ, whether they’re conscious of it or not, they’re members of the Body of Christ. And I don’t think that we’re going to see a great sweeping revival, that will turn the whole world to Christ at any time. I think James answered that, the Apostle James in the first council in Jerusalem, when he said that God’s purpose for this age is to call out a people for his name. And that’s what God is doing today, He’s calling people out of the world for His name, whether they come from the Muslim world, or the Buddhist world, or the Christian world or the non-believing world, they are members of the Body of Christ because they’ve been called by God. They may not even know the name of Jesus but they know in their hearts that they need something that they don’t have, and they turn to the only light that they have, and I think they are saved, and that they’re going to be with us in heaven.

  Within protestant Christianity, there is a movement of progressive Christians such as Brian McLaren, author of “Faith after Doubt: Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working and What to Do About It” who are taking a more open-minded view of faith. A female missionary, who had several generations of missionaries in her family, came to our church to talk about some of McLaren’s ideas. People in the audience were speechless because these ideas were so contrary to our prevailing dogmatism, and yet this missionaries’ credentials and background in coming from several generations of serving Jesus was unassailable.

  These are some of the observations I have seen from within my faith which, combined with my own personal experience, makes me convinced that religion and open-mindedness are not as incompatible as you claim.

  4) My doubt about the adequacy of human-derived scientific knowledge in removing all biases

  My perspective is that just as religion often creates biases that prevent us from being able to reason or think about the truth clearly, scientific culture has its own biases as well. Science as an aspirational ideal should in principle empower us to discover the truth and free us from bias, but the problem is that the scientific knowledge that we actually have access to is already contaminated with biases originating from the biased humans who have been doing the science. I can name one bias that scientific materialists may be more vulnerable to than sincere religious adherents: and that is the fear of death. Once you can think about your own physical death with reduced emotional reaction, it is possible to see more clearly some of the lies that you tell yourself out of the instinct of self-preservation. That is why Christianity teaches one to rely on Biblical beliefs and a sense of a relationship with God to overcome fear of death and to pursue the goal of cultivating humility—which in one sense is a freedom from the effect of the egoistic lies we tell ourselves as a result of our fear of death.

  5) Things I don’t have time to write more about

  I’m happy to go into more detail about my experiences and my research into religion and spirituality. You mention that religion can prevent people from trying to find their own meaning in life or to confront the reality of death. My experience has been that while this appears to be true of a small fraction of religious people, many believers still struggle just as much as atheists in terms of trying to find meaning or trying to accept the reality of death. Furthermore, I do not think religion, insofar as it has been humanly constructed, has been designed to spare believers from these questions, and I think that texts such as the Book of Job would support my view. And does religion spare us from having to find meaning in our lives? I am not quite sure how to answer it. Perhaps the problem of finding meaning is more challenging or urgent for an atheist. However, it still exists for the believer. While we are encouraged to trust in God’s plan for us, it’s not so simple to just stop thinking about what we are supposed to do here. Perhaps God doesn’t tell us everything, so we also have to figure it out ourselves, just like you. In some ways you could see atheism as taking the easy way out, since nothing you do has permanent consequence. From my belief system, on the other hand, there’s no decision I am justified in taking lightly, since it all has eternal consequences and my work will be evaluated by a perfect judge. Sometimes that feels like an amplification of the problem of meaning—I not only have to find the meaning of my life overall, but I have to figure out the meaning of every single moment in the context of eternity.

• snarles 15 Apr 2019 16:05 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: mako yass’s comment on: The Hard Work of Trans­la­tion (Bud­dhism)

  Thanks for the link MakoYass.

  I am familiar with the concept of superrationality, which seems similar with what you are describing. The lack of special relationship between observer moments—let’s call it non-continuity—is also a common concept in many mystical traditions. I view both of these concepts as different than the concept of unity, “we are all one”.

  Superrationality combines a form of unity with a requirement for rationality. I could think that “we are all one” without thinking that we should behave rationally. If I thought, “we are all one” and and also that “one ought to be rational”, the behavior that results might be described as superrational.

  Non-continuity is orthogonal to unity. I could think “we are distinct” and still think “I only exist in the moment”. This might have been the view of Heraclitus. But I could also think “we are one” and also think “we only exist in the moment.” This might be a natural view to have if you think of the universe as an amplitude distribution over a large number of quantum states that is evolving according to some transition function. If you identify with a particular quantum state, then there is no sense in which you have a unique “past” or “future” path, because all “moments” (states) are concurrent: the only thing that is changing is the amplitude flow.

• snarles 13 Apr 2019 23:03 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: mako yass’s comment on: The Hard Work of Trans­la­tion (Bud­dhism)

  I am not familiar with those concepts. References would be appreciated. 🙏

• snarles 13 Apr 2019 21:31 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: mako yass’s comment on: The Hard Work of Trans­la­tion (Bud­dhism)

  It seems obvious that your change in relationship with suffering constitutes a kind of value shift, doesn’t it?

  This is not obvious to me. In the first place, I never had the value “avoid suffering” even before I started my practices. Since before I even knew the concept of suffering, I have always had the compulsion of avoiding suffering, but the value to transcend it.

  What’s your relationship with value drift? Are you unafraid of it? That gradual death by mutation? The infidelity of your future self?

  I am afraid of value drift, but I am even more afraid that the values that I already have are based on incoherent thinking and false assumptions, which, once exposed, would lead me to realize that I have been spending my life in pursuing the wrong things entirely.

  Because I am afraid of both value drift and value incoherence, I place a high priority in learning how I can upgrade my understanding of my own values, while at the same time being very cautious about which sources I trust and learn from. I cannot seek to improve value coherence without making myself vulnerable to value drift. Therefore, I only invest in learning from sources authored by people who appear to be aligned with my values.

  Do you see it as a kind of natural erosion, a more vital aspect of the human telos than the motive aspects it erodes?

  No, I do not think that value drift is inevitable, nor do I think the “higher purpose”, if such a thing exists, involves constantly drifting. My goal is to achieve a state of value constancy.

• snarles 13 Apr 2019 20:48 UTC

  6 points

  0

  in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: The Hard Work of Trans­la­tion (Bud­dhism)

  Anyone, it seems, can have the experience of “feeling totally fine and at ease while simultaneously experiencing intense … pain”[1]:

  It would greatly please me if people could achieve a deeper understanding of suffering just by taking analgesics. If that were the case, perhaps we should encourage people to try them just for that purpose. However, I’m guessing that the health risks, especially cognitive side-effects (a reduction of awareness that would preclude the possibility of gaining any such insight), risks of addiction and logistical issues surrounding the distribution of drugs for non-medical purposes will render infeasible any attempt to systematically employment of analgesics for the purpose of spiritual insight. In all likelihood, we’ll be stuck with the same old meditations and pranayamas and asanas for a while.

  But the reason you bring up the topic of analgesics, if I am not mistaken, is to challenge the legitimacy of my insight by an argument that boils down to: “the experience you describe could be obtained through drugs, so it must not be that profound”. I do not know if you were also expecting to rely on a negative halo effect of “drug usage” to augment your rhetoric, but as you may have guessed from the preceding paragraph, my opinion is that the negative connotations of drug-induced states is due to irrational associations. If we ignore the drugs, then the remaining constituent of your rhetoric is the underlying assumption that “any easily obtained insight must be trivial.” That is far from the truth. I believe there are many simple things that people could do, which would profoundly increase their wisdom at a very low cost [1]. But precisely because these things are so simple, people wouldn’t take them seriously even if somebody suggested it to them. (The chance is a bit higher, but still not terribly high, if it’s said by the teacher of an expensive paid workshop, or their guru, or their psychotherapist. But the most effective way so far to get people to do these kinds of simple things is to integrate them inside some elaborate social ritual.)

  But concluding from this that “there’s no such thing as suffering” is a conceptual confusion of the highest order—and not some insight into deep Truth.

  I agree that the statement “there’s no such thing as suffering” is false, and not any kind of insight into deep Truth.

  That’s because I am not claiming that “there’s no such thing as suffering.” I claim to have an insight which can’t be described in words, but the best verbal description of this insight is something like “suffering is an illusion.”

  I don’t even consider this insight to be particularly deep. Like you said, maybe you could get it by taking painkillers. Certainly not an insight into deep Truth. That is not to say that I don’t take other people’s suffering seriously—far from it, it concerns me greatly. However if you were to compare the difficulty of understanding suffering and the difficulty of understanding consciousness, I think suffering is a far easier problem to resolve.

  ETA: And it seems to me to be far from obvious, that it is good or desirable to voluntarily induce in yourself a state akin to a morphine high or a lobotomy… especially if doing so has the additional consequence of leading you into the most elementary conceptual errors

  You are wise to be cautious, because neural self-modification could potentially lead to states where one loses all concern for one’s own well-being. However, just because an altered state of consciousness is similar to a drug-induced state or a state of neurological impairment doesn’t, by itself, imply that it should be avoided. It all depends on whether you’ve taken appropriate steps to control the risk (e.g. by only accessing the state under the guidance of an experienced teacher), and what insight you stand to gain by experiencing that state. The states of consciousness may be the same, but the intentions and degree of control makes all the difference. Recreational drug users pursue these states with little or no understanding of the process, little or no control over the outcomes, and out of the intention of thrill-seeking, social bonding, or alleviating boredom. Mystics pursue these states, often backed up by a tradition which has precise knowledge of how to attain these states, are equipped with mental tools to control the process, and seek these states with the intention of obtaining insights that will be of enduring value to their lives.

  [1] Such as: take just one hour to think and reflect. Dance with abandon. Volunteer to take care of children. Go to the forest, just to look around. Play in the mud. Fast for one day. Learn and go see where your food comes from, how your clothes are made.

• snarles 13 Apr 2019 4:52 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Benquo’s comment on: The Hard Work of Trans­la­tion (Bud­dhism)

  I would assign that a probability less than 0.1, and that’s because I already experienced some insights which defy verbal transmission. For instance, I feel that I am close to experientially understanding the question of “what is suffering?” The best way I can formulate my understanding into words is, “there is no such thing as suffering. It is an illusion.” I don’t think additional words or higher-context instructions would help in conveying my understanding to someone who cannot relate to the experience of feeling totally fine and at ease while simultaneously experiencing intense physical and emotional pain.

  I don’t think Buddha ever attempted to describe the Truth in words. Sometimes he would give a koan to a student who just needed a little push. But most of his sutras were for giving the instructions for how students could work at the Truth, and also just practical advice on how to live skillfully.

• snarles 13 Apr 2019 4:19 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: romeostevensit’s comment on: The Hard Work of Trans­la­tion (Bud­dhism)

  I’m reducing my subjective probability that you will abandon rationality...

  I suppose what you are attempting is similar to what Buddha did in the first place. The sages of his time must have felt pained to see their beautiful non-dualism sliced and diced into mass-produced sutras, rather than the poems and songs and mythology which were, up until then, the usual vehicle of expression for these truths.

  I guess I’m just narcissistic enough to still be a Quinean naturalist and say ‘yep, that is also me.’

  Considering God to be part of yourself is very elevated and good. The only problem is the things that you don’t consider to be part of yourself. So I guess what I am saying is that you should amplify your narcissism :)

• snarles 12 Apr 2019 15:44 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: The Hard Work of Trans­la­tion (Bud­dhism)

  The truths of General Relativity cannot be conveyed in conventional language. But does one have to study the underlying mathematics before evaluating its claims?

  Just as there exists a specialized language that accurately conveys General Relativity, there similarly exists a specialized language (mythological language) for conveying mystical truths. However, I think the wrong approach would be to try to understand that language without having undergone the necessary spiritual preparation. As St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2:14

  The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.

  This echoes countless similar statements in other traditions, the most famous (and probably oldest) being “the Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.”

  That is not to say that one cannot approximate the truth by means of analogy, You can approximately capture the truth General Relativity in the statement, “gravity bends space.” This approximation of the truth is useful because it allows you to understand certain consequences of that truth, such as gravitational lensing. Hence, even someone untrained in physics can be convinced of General Relativity, because they understand an approximate version of it, which in turn intuitively explains phenomena such as the Hubble Space telescope photo of a horseshoe Einstein ring.

  Likewise, approximations to the Truth abound in the various spiritual traditions. “God exists, and is the only entity that exists. I am God, you are God, we are all one being” is one such approximation [1]. It is an approximation because the words “you” and “God” are not well-defined. My own definition of these terms has been continually evolving as I progress in spirituality.

  One consequence of this approximation is that the feeling that we are separate individuals must be flawed. I will take another analogy from physics: the four fundamental forces are in fact different aspects of the same unified force, but they become distinct at lower energy levels. At higher energy levels, they become clearly unified.

  Similarly, I have experienced that at high levels of awareness, my feeling of distinctness from other people and from the rest of the universe is reduced. It starts to seem like “my thoughts” and “my feelings” are not mine, they are just the thoughts generated by one particular mind, and furthermore I feel like I can start to feel what others are feeling. I have encountered others who appear to be even higher on the “energy scale.” One day I was greeted extremely warmly out of the blue by a homeless man who was just working on the street. I responded to him in kind.

  A consequence of the statement “we are all One” is that we should be able to experience this unity. If there exist people who experience this as a reality (and not just as an altered state,) they should be able to detect the thoughts and feelings of others around them. I find it plausible that such people exist, both from my reading and my encounters with people such as the homeless man. But it does bother me that there exists no known scientific mechanism that would enable us to read each other’s minds, other than some very speculative ideas about consciousness being based on quantum phenomenon.

  I do not expect that this particular example should be particularly convincing to a skeptic. I know that there exist non-mystical theories for explaining non-dualistic states, for instance Jill Bolte Taylor’s theory that it is caused by a switch in dominance from the left to the right hemisphere. What ultimately convinced me to ‘cross over’ was not a single experience or insight but rather the aggregation of many experiences: listing all of these would distract from the point I am trying to making. I suggest any curious individuals to consult the much richer collection of data on personal experiences that exists in the religious studies literature; my own experiences are nothing special in comparison.

  My aim for now was just to address your question about how a claim can be evaluated in the absence of the necessary cognitive framework to understand its content. To summarize, one limited form of evaluation can be obtained by learning of the different approximations of the truth, and then evaluating consequences of those approximations in comparison to empirical data.

  That said, at a certain stage of maturity, one who is seeking the truth should stop bothering with approximations, because the approximations will not give you that necessary cognitive framework to really understand the truth. Reading popular science books can never give you the understanding that a Ph. D. physicist has obtained from rigorous training. You have to “sit down and learn the math”, or in the case of spirituality, to follow your chosen path. If the approximations have any value, it would only be in giving the hope that the skeptic needs before they can make the commitment to seek the real thing.

  [1] Another approximation, equally valid in my view, would be that “God created you and loves you.” Note that combining with the first approximation yields the near-tautology that “You love yourself.” Still, even a statement such as “God loves you” which might be parsed to something logically trivial can take a new profoundness to one who has undergone the proper cultivation.

  Another approximation is “there is no self.” Or that “everything is nothing.” Combine those two, and you get “everything is self.” The name of the Hindu god Shiva, literally means “No-thing.”

• snarles 12 Apr 2019 1:23 UTC

  7 points

  0

  on: The Hard Work of Trans­la­tion (Bud­dhism)

  I started out as a self-identified rationalist, got fascinated by mysticism and ‘went native.’ Ever since, I have been watching the rationality from the sidelines to see if anyone else will ‘cross over’ as well.

  I predict that if Romeo continues to work on methods for teaching meditation, that eventually he will also ‘go mystical’ and publicly rescind his claim that all perceived metaphysical insights can be explained as pathological disconnects with reality caused by neural rewiring. Conditional on his continuing to teach, I predict with 70% probability that it occurs within the next 10 years.

  There are two theories that both lead me to make this prediction, which I call Theory M and Theory D. I ascribe probability 0.8 to Theory M and 0.15 to Theory D. I ascribe a probability of 0.02 to their intersection.

  Theory M (‘Mystical’) is that there exists a truth that cannot be expressed in conventional language, and that truth has been rediscovered independently by hundreds of seekers throughout history, and that many of the most established spiritual traditions—Taoist, Buddhist, Hindu, Kabbalistic, Christian, Sufi, and many others—were founded for the purpose of disseminating that same truth. If Theory M is true, and conditional on Romeo continuing to teach, I predict that his role in the community will motivate him to deepen his practice and will also bring him in contact with teachers from other spiritual practices. These experiences will catalyze his own mystical insights.

  Theory D (‘Delusional’) is that spiritual seekers expose themselves to mechanisms of self-delusion that are so strong that they would even convince someone who is initially highly identified with rationality and skepticism to start assigning a high probability that Theory M is true.

  The main reason I place so much confidence in Theory M is similar to the reason why string theorists place so much confidence in string theory: so many aspects of reality that were previously baffling to me are suddenly very comprehensible and elegant when I understand them through Theory M. Secondary reasons are my personal experiences, but I concede that some aspect of these could be due to delusions so I will not defend them here.

  The reason I have so much confidence in Theory D is that I consider myself to have a high capacity for rational thinking, that I am very well-informed in the ideas of the rationality community and I consider myself knowledgeable about a variety of disciplines necessary for understanding reality: neuroscience, psychology, sociology, statistics, philosophy, biology, physics, religious history. I hold a Ph. D. in Statistics and am currently working as a research scientist in a research institution specializing in mental health research. And yet I have daily experiences which reaffirm my confidence in Theory M. If theory M is not true, then I would conclude that the delusion I am suffering is incredibly strong, lies outside of all mental diseases which I know about and evades my own attempts to self-diagnose. I admit that I have little incentive to eliminate the delusion since it makes my life so pleasant. I admit that I perhaps could have protected myself from delusion even more solidly by embedding myself deeply in a physical social community that was dedicated to rationality. I have not done that. However, I am surrounded by scientists at my workplace.

  If theory M is true, then I warmly wish all of you reading to discover its truth. If it is not true, I wish for my delusion to be eliminated so that I can stop living in a pleasant fantasy and re-align myself with rationalists who are trying to maximize their positive impact on the world.

  I expect that my views will not find much support among you, but I challenge you to judge my claims by the professed standards of your own community. If you feel yourself strongly disagreeing with me, I challenge you to engage me as a fellow rationalist (or to point out how I have violated the community rules of discourse) rather than succumbing the knee-jerk reaction of dismissing a set of beliefs which make you uncomfortable.

• snarles 25 Oct 2015 18:25 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: So8res’s comment on: The trou­ble with Bayes (draft)

  Cool, I will take a look at the paper!

• snarles 24 Oct 2015 14:53 UTC

  5 points

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  in reply to: So8res’s comment on: The trou­ble with Bayes (draft)

  Great comment, mind if I quote you later on? :)

  That said, if you have example problems where a logically omniscient Bayesian reasoner who incorporates all your implicit knowledge into their prior would get the wrong answers, those I want to see, because those do bear on the philosophical question that I currently see Bayesian probability theory as providing an answer to—and if there’s a chink in that armor, then I want to know :-)

  It is well known where there might be chinks in the armor, which is what happens when two logically omniscient Bayesians sit down to play a a game of Poker? Bayesian game theory is still in a very developmental stage (in fact, I’m guessing it’s one of the things MIRI is working on) and there could be all kinds of paradoxes lurking in wait to supplement the ones we’ve already encountered (e.g. two-boxing.)

• snarles 24 Oct 2015 14:43 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: So8res’s comment on: The trou­ble with Bayes (draft)

  If the game is really working like they say it is, then the frequentist is often concentrating probability around some random psi for no good reason, and when we actually draw random thetas and check who predicted better, we’ll see that they actually converged around completely the wrong values. Thus, I doubt the claim that, setting up the game exactly as given, the frequentist converges on the “true” value of psi. If we assume the frequentist does converge on the right answer, then I strongly suspect either (1) we should be using a prior where the observations are informative about psi even if they aren’t informative about theta or (2) they’re making an assumption that amounts to forcing us to use the “tortured” prior. I wouldn’t be too surprised by (2),

  The frequentist result does converge, and it is possible to make up a very artificial prior which allows you to converge to psi. But the fact that you can make up a prior that gives you the frequentist answer is not surprising.

  A useful perspective is this: there are no Bayesian methods, and there are no frequentist methods. However, there are Bayesian justifications for methods (“it does well based in the average case”) and frequentist justifications (“it does well asymptotically or in a minimax sense”) for methods. If you construct a prior in order to converge to psi asymptotically, then you may be formally using Bayesian machinery, but the justification you could possibly give for your method is completely frequentist.

• snarles 23 Oct 2015 16:03 UTC

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  in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: The trou­ble with Bayes (draft)

  Ok. So the scenario is that you are sampling only from the population f(X)=1.

  EDIT: Correct, but you should not be too hung up on the issue of conditional sampling. The scenario would not change if we were sampling from the whole population. The important point is that we are trying to estimate a conditional mean of the form E[Y|f(X)=1]. This is a concept commonly seen in statistics. For example, the goal of non-parametric regression is to estimate a curve defined by f(x) = E[Y|X=x].

  Can you exhibit a simple example of the scenario in the section “A non-parametric Bayesian approach” with an explicit, simple class of functions g and distribution over them, for which the proposed procedure arrives at a better estimate of E[ Y | f(X)=1 ] than the sample average?

  The example I gave in my first reply (where g(x) is known to be either one of two known functions h(x) or j(x)) can easily be extended into the kind of fully specified counterexample you are looking for: I’m not going to bother to do it, because it’s very tedious to write out and it’s frankly a homework-level problem.

  Is the idea that it is intended to demonstrate, simply that prior knowledge about the joint distribution of X and Y would, combined with the sample, give a better estimate than the sample alone?

  The fact that prior information can improve your estimate is already well-known to statisticians. But statisticians disagree on whether or not you should try to model your prior information in the form of a Bayesian model. Some Bayesians have expressed the opinion that one should always do so. This post, along with Wasserman/​Robbins/​Ritov’s paper, provides counterexamples where the full non-parametric Bayesian model gives much worse results than the “naive” approach which ignores the prior.

• snarles 23 Oct 2015 15:55 UTC

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  on: The trou­ble with Bayes (draft)

  Update from the author:

  Thanks for all of the comments and corrections! Based on your feedback, I have concluded that the article is a little bit too advanced (and possibly too narrow in focus) to be posted in the main section of the site. However, it is clear that there is a lot of interest in the general subject. Therefore, rather than posting this article to main, I think it would be more productive to write a “Philosophy of Statistics” sequence which would provide the necessary background for this kind of post.

• snarles 21 Oct 2015 0:55 UTC

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  in reply to: IlyaShpitser’s comment on: The trou­ble with Bayes (draft)

  The confusion may come from mixing up my setup and Robins/​Ritov’s setup. There is no missing data in my setup.

  I could write up my intuition for the hierarchical model. It’s an almost trivial result if you don’t assume smoothness, since for any x1,...,xn the parameters g(x1)...g(xn) are conditionally independent given p and distributed as F(p), where F is the maximum entropy Beta with mean p (I don’t know the form of the parameters alpha(p) and beta(p) off-hand). Smoothness makes the proof much more difficult, but based on high-dimensional intuition one can be sure that it won’t change the result substantially.

  It is quite possible that estimating E[Y] and E[Y|event] are “equivalently hard”, but they are both interesting problems with different quite different real-world applications. The reason I chose to write about estimating E[Y|event] is because I think it is easier to explain than importance sampling.

• snarles 20 Oct 2015 21:36 UTC

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  in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: The trou­ble with Bayes (draft)

  I didn’t reply to your other comment because although you are making valid points, you have veered off-topic since your initial comment. The question of “which observations to make?” is not a question of inference but rather one of experimental design. If you think this question is relevant to the discussion, it means that you neither understand the original post nor my reply to your initial comment. The questions I am asking have to do with what to infer after the observations have already been made.

• snarles 20 Oct 2015 19:29 UTC

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  in reply to: IlyaShpitser’s comment on: The trou­ble with Bayes (draft)

  By “importance sampling distribution” do you mean the distribution that tells you whether Y is missing or not?

  Right. You could say the cases of Y1|D=1 you observe in the population are an importance sample from Y1, the hypothetical population that would result if everyone in the population were treated. E[Y1], the quantity to be estimated, is the mean of this hypothetical population. The importance sampling weights are q(x) = Pr[D=1|x]/​p(x) where p(x) is the marginal distribution (ie you invert these weights to get the average), the importance sampling distribution is the conditional density of X|D=1.

• snarles 20 Oct 2015 18:53 UTC

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  in reply to: MrMind’s comment on: The trou­ble with Bayes (draft)

  I will go ahead and answer your first three questions

  1. Objective Bayesians might have “standard operating procedures” for common problems, but I bet you that I can construct realistic problems where two Objective Bayesians will disagree on how to proceed. At the very least the Objective Bayesians need an “Objective Bayesian manifesto” spelling out what are the canonical procedures. For the “coin-flipping” example, see my response to RichardKennaway where I ask whether you would still be content to treat the problem as coin-flipping if you had strong prior infromation on g(x).

  2. MaxENT is not invariant to parameterization, and I’m betting that there are examples where it works poorly. Far from being a “universal principle” it ends up being yet another heuristic joining the ranks of asymptotic optimality, minimax, minimax relative to oracle, etc. Not to say these are bad principles—each of them is very useful, but when and where to use them is still subjective.

  3. That would be great if you could implement a Solomonoff prior. It is hard to say whether implementing an approximate algorithmic prior which doesn’t produce garbage is easier or harder than encoding the sum total of human scientific knowledge and heuristics into a Bayesian model, but I’m willing to bet that it is. (This third bet is not a serious bet, the first two are.)

• snarles 20 Oct 2015 18:43 UTC

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  in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: The trou­ble with Bayes (draft)

  It is worth noting that the issue of non-consistency is just as troublesome in the finite setting. In fact, in one of Wasserman’s examples he uses a finite (but large) space for X.