Something just clicked for me. I mean, regarding the subject of the original post. There is a true dilemma, and in that dilemma, the choices of a pure Bayesian will look crazy to a Scientist, and vice versa.
The hard difference between Science and Bayes is that Bayes does not require a model; Science does. Bayes simply predicts probabilities; Science attempts to establish a model that explains the probabilities.
Thus, a Bayesian won’t care about the quality of the model he’s given, EXCEPT that it must not be complex (a nonexistent model will work just fine).
MW (like all the others I’ve seen) is a lousy model, so science is not satisfied with it; but to a Bayesian, the quality of the model is irrelevant, so a Bayesian can accept the model or ignore it and not even ask for something better.
I’m definitely sounding like I disapprove of this pure Bayesian thinking. I’m starting to see that science plus bayes is more complex than bayes alone (which is a win for pure Bayesian thought), but I’m still not sure that not being able to make models is a good tradeoff for pure simplicity.
“@Caledonian: If it is an old and trivial insight, why do most scientists and near all non-scientists ignore it?”
They don’t. The mismatch between you and them is that they’re busy thinking about something else at the moment. I like the rule Turney gave above: “Doubt everything, but one at a time, not all at once.” Of course, a single person can’t follow that rule completely (there’s not enough time in a lifespan to doubt EVERYTHING), and most people pick the wrong things to doubt or are lazy in applying the rule.
Of course, that rule’s going to get in the way of reaching truth in some cases (some falsehoods come in self-reinforcing pairs both of which must be doubted in order to falsify either, and some things can’t profitably be denied even for the sake of argument), but that’s the case with any process, and this is something we’ve known since Goedel.
This kind of confuses me about this series… If all he was telling us was that Science is a powerful set of rules, and that therefore it can’t eliminate all contradictions nor state all facts, I’d simply agree with him. But he seems to be saying that Bayesianism is different from Science, that somehow applying it instead of Science will have better results. It seems to me that both are processes, and both have blind spots.