Re: [agi] Two draft papers: AI and existential risk; heuristics and biases

From: Peter de Blanc (peter.deblanc@verizon.net)
Date: Thu Jun 08 2006 - 12:32:32 MDT


On Thu, 2006-06-08 at 08:25 -0700, Ben Goertzel wrote:
> Hmmm... IMO, the latter statement is pretty silly...
>
> I have never met a scientist who did not accept Bayes Theorem as a
> piece of mathematics.
>
> The argument between Bayesian and other approaches to uncertain
> inference and statistical modeling is not about whether Bayes Theorem
> is true or not, but rather about which heuristic assumptions one
> should make when applying this and other probabilistic mathematics to
> the real world. Classicial statistics makes one set of heuristic
> assumptions, conventional Bayesian statistics makes another ...
> alternate approaches like Walley's imprecise probabilities or NARS
> make yet other assumptions.... I happen to find some of these
> assumption-sets preferable to others, but that's another story..

Okay, maybe I was being a bit sensationalist. I should instead have said
that the Bayesian philosophy of science is not part of the scientific
consensus.

What heuristic assumptions do you think Bayesian statistics make?



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