Can you recommend an overview of everything wrong with probabilistic epistemology? I haven’t found one. There’s lots of papers that say “this particular objection is fatal, so why don’t you guys stop pretending,” but maybe no compendium of those?
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Problem is, for each objection, probabilists say “that’s not fatal, we can deal with it (in special cases at least) by adding a whole lot of extra complexity to our story.”
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Collecting all the nearly-fatal objections to probabilistic epistemology in one place would issue a more difficult challenge: can you accommodate all these simultaneously? I don’t want to do this job, but it would be a major service if someone did. (Or has!)
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Courtesy
@ArtirKel, here is a list of eight (nearly?) fatal problems with (Bayesian) probabilism, with brief explanations. It would be great to have something like this, but more comprehensive, and with more discussion. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-bayesian/#PotPro …3 replies 4 retweets 9 likesShow this thread -
Replying to @Meaningness @ArtirKel
Good heavens. Have philosophers never read about how Bayes nets work? Uncertain observations are technology at this point; you send up a non-extreme lambda message. (And this doesn't even violate probability theorems qua theorems, as so many approximations understandably do.)
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And I say this to illustrate a larger dichotomy: naive toolboxers see a problem and think they've discovered a context in which to not use that tool. Sophisticated thinkers who have Lawful thinking as an option are much more likely to wonder if the generalization still holds.
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Replying to @ESYudkowsky @ArtirKel
“Naive Toolboxer” seems analogous to Straw Vulcan here.
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Replying to @Meaningness @ArtirKel
Absolutely. Sophisticated thinkers can conceive of both context-dependent recipes and universal generalizations. They are ready to adapt tools as required, and expect to repair laws without compromising them. But Straw Vulcans exist in real life, and so do naive toolboxers.
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Okay… we agree that it is possible to fail to apply rational methods when they would be useful, and some people may make that mistake often.
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Replying to @Meaningness @ArtirKel
That's still Toolbox thinking! There are perspectives on life besides whether some recipe would be useful at a given moment!
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Replying to @ESYudkowsky @ArtirKel
Yes, you are right. Let me amend the previous tweet to “framework” from “method.” This may be revealing, as you are arguing. 1/2
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