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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Isn’t this Taleb’s lifelong mission? Though I think Cosmo Shalizi is best-in-class.
Takes a probabilist to catch a probabilist generally,
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Lots of people understand that probabilism is wrong. And, lots of people write about how it is wrong. What seems missing is a comprehensive list of all the ways it’s wrong.
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I think no one has done that because there’s like 20 fatal defects, and if you want to argue against it, it seems like one conclusive argument should be sufficient. Who wants to comb the literature to find another 19?
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The real defense of probabilism is “where’s your alternative?” There’s no answer, if an alternative is required to be a fixed, guaranteed way of gaining knowledge mechanically without understanding what is going on.
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I’d say probabilism is basically a cognitive gamble that allows humans and machines to pretend to think until they’re caught out.
Poetically appropriate. “Correlation is not causation” is less a warning than the ignored CYA-TOS you click through to use probabilism.
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Unfortunately this has become standard practice in many/most sciences. Result: replication crisis.
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Philosophers of science and statisticians have both been pointing out for ~70 years that probability doesn’t work like that. But it’s too convenient for scientists to go on pretending.
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