Timeline for Are degrees of beliefs represented as probabilities just emotions?
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| Feb 17 at 19:33 | comment | added | Baby_philosopher | @Conifold Your analogy is poor then since not only is electric potential mind independent unlike subjective degrees of belief, but the very notion of potential is defined with respect to a field. Talk of fields imply talk of potential. However, talk of rankings among propositions do not imply talk of probabilities or degrees. People ranked beliefs among propositions in their head without resorting to probabilities, degrees of beliefs, or any form of Bayesian like updating for centuries. They did this by comparing epistemic values among different theories: no numbers needed | |
| Feb 17 at 9:30 | comment | added | Conifold | It is not about whether or not the potential is accurate either, accuracy is moot, it only serves to determine the field. The analog of the field in Bayesianism is the ranking, the prior is just a mathematical convenience, like potentials, frames of reference, potentials, etc. Apparently, you cannot distinguish "does not have invariant meaning" from "meaningless" either. I am not even mentioning attaching emotions to minds, which need not have them, etc. This "argument" is so full of non-sequiturs that you need to scrap it and start from scratch. With a more defensible thesis. | |
| Feb 17 at 6:27 | comment | added | Baby_philosopher | @Conifold It’s not about whether or not the prior is accurate: it’s about the fact that the very notion of a probability attached to a proposition is meaningless. And there is nothing in belief making that requires attaching probabilities to your beliefs. Arguably, it is actually never rational to attach them; we only ever believe something as opposed to something else anyways, never by itself. One just needs to know which one of A, B, or C one believes in if they are mutually exclusive. One does not need to attach probabilities to them to ever make a decision | |
| Feb 17 at 5:08 | comment | added | Conifold | So your "argument" is that since Bayesianism cannot do everything it, therefore, can do nothing but channel emotions. And without slapping a number on the prior "there’s simply no way reason can help you". I got news for you. Electrostatic potential is also defined only up to an arbitrary number. So there is no way reason can help you with potential you should have and electrostatics is just emotions. Kidding. Physicists do with it what Bayesians do with the prior, they call it fixing the gauge. | |
| Feb 17 at 3:56 | comment | added | Baby_philosopher | @Conifold “Predictive success” deals with the base rate problem where you have to decide which one of the past cases a new case is similar to, and that is up to judgement that cannot itself be instilled through Bayesianism. More importantly, important propositions such as God’s existence have no base cases to be compared to, so there’s simply no way reason can help you not only define what credence is but what specific credence you should have. | |
| Feb 16 at 23:50 | comment | added | Conifold | What is does not tell you what should be or what to do, that is just Hume's guillotine and applies universally. It is also irrelevant here since predictive success is assumed as the purpose. Specific values of priors are moot when comparing predictive success after many updates. Bayesianism is not about their selection (one can pick some nominal value), it is about what to do with them to make decisions. So yes, reason can tell you what rational credences should be given the purpose and modulo irrelevant numerics, and what the title question "implies" is trivially false. | |
| Feb 16 at 23:36 | comment | added | Baby_philosopher | What I’m trying to say is that obeying the probability calculus does not tell you what credence you should have. At best they tell you how to update credences, not your prior ones. And so the title question implies that those “credences” are ultimately nothing more than conscious sensations since there is nothing in reason that can tell you what credence you should have or what it even means to have a credence in the first place. The very notion of a degree of belief is up for debate @Conifold | |
| Feb 16 at 21:19 | comment | added | Conifold | Again, your further questions are moot to the title question. What credences a rational agent should have and how they should be updated is a separate issue, but the answer is certainly not determined by "just emotions", or emotions at all. There are Dutch book arguments that for predictive success they should use probability calculus, and that is surely mind-independent. You keep confusing mind dependence with available information dependence, and mind with computations, see Yudkowsky on Less Wrong. | |
| Feb 16 at 21:01 | comment | added | Baby_philosopher | What is the degree of belief that one should have in the proposition that beliefs should be represented as degrees and updated a certain way? | |
| Feb 16 at 20:57 | comment | added | Baby_philosopher | @Conifold We were talking about indeterminacies that an agent has. These are psychological states that cannot exist mind independently. Can you give me an example of a mind independent probabilistic statement that doesn’t just resort to talking about frequencies? Even probability in QM is just shorthand for the results we see through empirical tests in the past. Regardless of QM, there is no mind independent standard that tells you what degree of belief you should have in a proposition. After all, there can’t be. Beliefs only exist in your head and so do probabilities behind belief. | |
| Feb 16 at 6:47 | comment | added | Conifold | I do not have a proposal, but "if X does not have emotions, then it must also not have indeterminacies" is trivially invalid (take any quantum system). Bayesians do have a calculus and credences there are typically used comparatively. So it matters little what their absolute values are, only how they are updated, and that is done by formulaic rules. "Mind independent probability is meaningless" is also trivially false. What is true is that "subjective" probability is available information-dependent, but whether the holder of said information is a mind or a computer is moot. | |
| Feb 16 at 4:26 | comment | added | Baby_philosopher | @Conifold Indeterminacies do not exist outside the mind. Meaningful propositions are either true or not: the notion of mind independent probability is meaningless. If the agents considered in your proposal do not have emotions, then they must also not have indeterminacies, so there is nothing to fill. An indeterminacy is merely a feeling/sensation/state of belief/call it whatever word you want: the world is indifferent to it all the same. | |
| Feb 16 at 0:39 | comment | added | Conifold | Whatever indeterminacies there are cannot be filled by emotions when the agents considered do not have them. So how are your remarks relevant to the question? | |
| Feb 15 at 22:24 | comment | added | Baby_philosopher | @Conifold The axioms of probability don’t tell you what credence you should have in a particular proposition. For example, your belief in P and not P should add up to 1. But there are an infinite number of ways for this to add to 1. So your comment is a distraction when that was not what was being referred to. Secondly, no axiom in probability can tell you that you should represent belief as probabilities in the first place | |
| Feb 10 at 9:45 | comment | added | Stef | @Bumble ...Yes? Thank you, I guess? | |
| Feb 10 at 4:08 | answer | added | causative♦ | timeline score: 0 | |
| Feb 10 at 2:07 | comment | added | Bumble | @Stef Bayes' theorem is a feature of any interpretation of probability. After all, it is a theorem. But Bayesianism is a distinctly different interpretation from the frequentist and other interpretations. It understands probabilities as degrees of rational belief and treats probability theory as a way to calculate and update degrees of beliefs in a rational fashion. The result is quite a different set of methods. E.g. Bayesians do not use null hypothesis significance testing. They do not use confidence intervals: they have their own similar quantity called a credible interval. | |
| Feb 10 at 0:01 | comment | added | Conifold | Did you miss the parts about whose degrees of belief are considered? "Probabilities are degrees of confidence, or credences, or partial beliefs of suitable agents. Thus, we really have many interpretations of probability here — as many as there are suitable agents... the suitable agents must be, in a strong sense, rational... this implies that the agent obeys the axioms of probability", SEP. "Subjective" and "belief" do not mean what they mean in psychology, for "rational agents that obey the axioms" emotions are moot. | |
| Feb 9 at 21:56 | comment | added | Stef | I strongly disagree with the distinction you make between frequentist and bayesian, or the definitions you give for frequentist and bayesian. The prototypical use-case of Bayes' theorem is the "what is the probability that you have the disease, knowing that you tested positive for the disease?" problem, in which both the prior "probability to have the disease" and "probability to test positive" are literally measured as frequencies in the population, and certainly not as "beliefs". | |
| Feb 9 at 19:01 | comment | added | Double Knot | Probably indeed so since the principal credence aka degree of belief as principle of probabilities often get emotional when applied to anything in reality perhaps except tossing an absolute fair and hard cold objective coin... | |
| Feb 9 at 15:28 | comment | added | Baby_philosopher | @MauroALLEGRANZA But things either are true or not. Probability is not inherent in things. How can there be a mind independent standard or relation between evidence and how strong your belief should be. | |
| Feb 9 at 14:54 | answer | added | Bumble | timeline score: 1 | |
| Feb 9 at 14:31 | answer | added | Professor Sushing | timeline score: 0 | |
| Feb 9 at 14:06 | comment | added | Mauro ALLEGRANZA | The Theory of Probability is logical, therefore, because it is concerned with the degree of belief which it is rational to entertain in given conditions, and not merely with the actual beliefs of particular individuals, which may or may not be rational” “When we argue that Darwin gives valid grounds for our accepting his theory of natural selection, we do not simply mean that we are psychologically inclined to agree with him; ... We believe that there is some real objective relation between Darwin’s evidence and his conclusions . . . ” 2/2 | |
| Feb 9 at 14:05 | comment | added | Mauro ALLEGRANZA | See Henry E. Kyburg Jr, Are there degrees of belief? (2003: Keynes is unequivocal in his insistence that probability represents a logical relation that is objective. “. . . in the sense important to logic, probability is not subjective. It is not, that is to say, subject to human caprice. A proposition is not probable because we think it so. When once the facts are given which determine our knowledge, what is probable or improbable in these circumstances has been fixed objectively, and is independent of our opinion. 1/2 | |
| Feb 9 at 13:46 | history | asked | Baby_philosopher | CC BY-SA 4.0 |