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sneer classic: The Cult of Bayes' Theorem by Stephen Bond
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this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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SneerClub
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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I was baffled by the shamelessly non-critical way my university stats course presented Bayesian inference. To transition smoothly from all the ways that we have to use data to produce compelling and realistic results and move on to... Numerical confidence in a belief... Seemed utterly ridiculous. Why include the belief at all? It just seems to me like you're introducing your own biases into actual data.
Software you write can have a "belief" as well. The course I took on it had us write Kalman filters, where you start with some estimate of a quantity. That estimate is your "belief", and you have a variance as well.
Each measurement you have a (value, variance) where the variance is derived from the quality of the sensor that produced it.
It's an overloaded word because humans are often unwilling to update their beliefs unless they are simple things, like "I believe the forks are in the drawer to the right of the sink". You believe that because you think you saw them their last. There is uncertainty - you might have misremembered, as your own memory is unreliable, your eyes are unreliable. If it's your kitchen and you've had thousands of observations, your belief has low uncertainty, if it's a new place your belief has high uncertainty.
If you go and look right now and the forks are in fact there you update your beliefs.
I think you can be sure we've all suffered sufficient Sequences to get this
this is an abuse of language. words have meanings, and those aren't them. To be clear, are you claiming the course taught you that software has beliefs, or is this a projection of your beliefs onto the course material?
No literally the course material has the word "belief". It means "at this instant what is the estimate of ground truth".
Those shaky blue lines that show where your Tesla on autopilot thinks the lane is? That's it's belief.
English and software have lots of overloaded terms.
Alright I know you’re temp banned but let’s just leave this to remind you that - whatever your opinion of philosophers - in a territorial pissing match between philosophers and…a software course you took one time…the philosophers, who between them have a very different and would you believe it somewhat richer account of doxa (look at that, it’s even in Greek), probably have kind of an edge here.
@YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM @sneerclub Au contraire: my brother-in-law is a retired philosophy professor, so Voice of Experiece here says: all philosophers are 99% FULL of shit, no exceptions.
(They try to use tools we have no actual understanding of—language and mind—to understand external reality. So they often get bogged down in self-serving rationalizations that appeal to their cognitive biases. There, I'm doing it too!)
Well I can’t speak to your experience with your brother, but I spoke of “philosophers” plural, and contrasted that with - quote - “a software course [our friend here] took one time”. Perhaps your brother isn’t great with mind and language, but that doesn’t mean that even he is so incompetent that he can’t do better than our target here. For all that philosophers plural, or this one philosopher, have hit stumbling blocks along the way, they have made an attempt to more than simply stipulate a wildly counter-intuitive and pragmatically tendentious meaning for this complicated word “belief” (indeed: “doxa”).
I don’t know where you get the idea that “we” have “no actual understanding” of language and mind, however, because at least philosophers (as well as their interdisciplinary friends in some of the sciences) have quite a lot of understanding of language and mind, and especially language. Since the innovations of Gottlob Frege, for example, the interpretation of semantics according to a logic of truth has been extremely helpful in clarifying how sentences bear relations to not just external but reality in general. Linguists have done extensive work on the pragmatics of language, which fills out this picture to make sense not just of propositional but questioning and commanding sentences.
These are just examples, there is obviously also a lot more.