tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2441249667051497124.post6742892924626576722..comments2023-10-05T03:13:53.319-07:00Comments on Reducing Suffering: Normal Beliefs: An Insanity Defense?Brian Tomasikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10510289096715716609noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2441249667051497124.post-31521325005762935562009-05-03T21:33:00.000-07:002009-05-03T21:33:00.000-07:00"(I wonder: Is there any sense in which it would b..."(I wonder: Is there any sense in which it would be possible to assign probability less than 1 to the Bayesian framework itself? Prima facie, this would be simply incoherent.)"<br /><br />I don't think that this has been done elegantly, but it's definitely an important problem for multiple purposes.<br /><br />With respect to Occam assigning exponentially diminishing probability to special miracles, I tend to think of this in terms of the broad set of hypotheses to be considered: if my probabilities are to sum up to 1 I can't coherently assign all my 'the world is a lie' probability mass to whatever hypothesis has been brought to my attention in the last five minutes. The code of a short program can be contained in astronomically many ways within a larger program. An indifference principle gets you going from there.<br /><br />What do you mean by nonvanishing probability? After you consider cosmically many other conspiracy/world is a lie hypotheses, if you don't have a gerrymandered prior-equivalent (e.g. from standard psychological causes of confident religious belief) it looks to me like probability adjusted for impact becomes negligible for decision purposes, but what numbers are you thinking about?Carlhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16384464120149476437noreply@blogger.com