

What Bayesianism taught me - gwern
http://lesswrong.com/lw/iat/what_bayesianism_taught_me/

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hitchhiker999
Honestly this is where so much stuff falls flat on its face. People claiming
they 'know' on either end of the nuts/pragmatic/scientifc spectrum.

'I think therefore I am' \- cliche ofc. Only thing I can prove.

BUT. Prove a damn thing after that. If you can, you're not logically correct,
you have no proof of anything outside of your existence. It looks real to you
- that's your 'proof'.

We've all thought this at least once: It could be a simulation, you can't
prove it's not.

You are choosing to believe you're living on earth, and there's a universe,
and you're in it, and it's made out of stuff.

You are choosing this (perhaps sensible) scenario, but it is a choice. Because
you may well be here reading this to yourself, from yourself, by yourself in
the vacuum of your own imagination - and you wouldn't know.

Anyways... once you pass all that, you get to pick and choose what you prefer,
and life becomes easier, and kinder, and more fun.. in my little experience
anyway. Because you know everything you see and do is half-bullshit, and it's
alllllright.

~~~
6d0debc071
Whether I live in my imagination or in an external reality moderated by my
senses, it would appear the same to me, and part of that appearing the same is
that it seems to follow rules beyond my conscious will that I can guess at
based on past experience.

I don't see how the fact that it might all be a dream makes the experience of
pain any less painful or the experience of pleasure any easier to come by. I
experience it all the same.

~~~
chronial
It obviously does not help when you hit you little toe on the leg of a table,
but it helps with more abstract problems. Realizing that philosophy can
neither be right or wrong (only illogical) makes for a more relaxed life
because you don’t have to worry about “the big questions”. You can just pick
the answers you like.

~~~
6d0debc071
Do you have examples? Depending on what the Big Questions are I may or may not
agree with that.

For example: It would be nice to believe in an omni-benevolent god that would
take care of me after I die. But that's the sort of answer that I'd want to
have confidence in - and I'd be aware that it's equally probable that there's
an omni-malicious god waiting to torture me forever.

If I'd started off believing in evil-god then the knowledge that I had no
information either way would be a comfort.

If I'd started off believing in good-god then it would be a burden.

Uncertainty in that respect neither comforts nor disturbs without reference to
a baseline belief, it just is.

And when we start talking about things like morality, there is a sense in
which there's a question as to what we're doing when we use moral language.
However, most of the thought experiments concern real life examples anyway -
outside of very specific areas of realist metaethics I don't think that's
something that most people think about very much.

I'm... struggling to think of any big questions about reality that would
affect my life. Ontology, epistemology - again most of the stuff I know is
more about how people think about their experience - or can be converted
directly into that talk with no loss of effect - than it is about esoteric
metaphysics.

~~~
chronial
> If I'd started off believing in good-god then it would be a burden.

I disagree on that point. Even a good-god would have rules that are probably
either complicated or vague, so trying to fulfill those will actually be a
burden on your everyday life.

We are not talking about uncertainty here. Quite the contrary: we are talking
about the clear certainty that there just is no true or false in these
questions, not that we can’t determine them.

At least for me, once I realized that, I stopped wondering about an afterlife
and just assumed the most probable version: nothing. And It doesn’t bother me
in any way.

For morals it also helped me a lot, as I realized that is no universal
good/bad. We (and especially I) create these notions ourselves and only by
ourselves. That means if am faced with moral questions, I can freely think
about what _I_ think is right or wrong and I don’t have to wonder about those
omnipresent values that kind of seem to be there.

But you referenced “most people” and I agree that they probably don’t spend a
lot of time thinking about these thinks. But that obviously doesn’t change my
perspective on the world.

But to give you more practical example: I guess everybody in the western world
is at least in some way faced with the question of how they are going to
handle the fact that their comfort and well-being is in a considerable degree
made possible by the suffering of others. This of course not a situation that
we created with our own hands, but we life in and by our everyday life support
a system that works like this. I would say that if you believe in absolute
morals, you either have to dedicate a significant part of your life to do
something about that or you are probably a hypocrite.

The mentioned realization allows you to avoid this dilemma.

~~~
hitchhiker999
I believe there's an afterlife, because the system we live in is insanely
complex. I won't discount that we may be simply living a temporary instance of
a 'experience'. I won't discount that I may be completely wrong, and will
vanish into a puff of nothingness. Either way I'm good.

However, regardless - I WISH there were more people like you on the planet,
things would get a whole lot better if we just started discussions as thinking
folk.

------
tambourmajor
Is agnosticism actually a consequence of Bayesianism?

~~~
Tuna-Fish
Depends on how you define agnosticism. To use a popular example, I am not
agnostic about you having an invisible fire-breathing dragon in your garage
despite not being able to put a flat 0% probability on it.

Bayesianism _redefines_ the concept of knowledge, which under Bayesianism is
represented as a probability. I have very strong knowledge that there is no
god. If given sufficiently strong proof against that, I will update my beliefs
about the issue -- but this does not mean the same as being unsure about it
now.

~~~
bayesianhorse
You shouldn't have any "knowledge" that there is no god.

The issue isn't that there is a small probability of god existing, but rather
there is a vanishingly small probability of your particular brand of god being
true versus all the other particular brands of god or gods being true.

The pudding in a Bayesian discussing is as so often in the normalizing
factor...

~~~
Tuna-Fish
No. I have done quite a lot of observations on the world. Each and every one
of those observations has produced a result congruent with a world in which no
gods exist, and so has very slightly nudged my P(god) towards zero. Under a
Bayesian philosophy, this probability is called knowledge.

~~~
bayesianhorse
Then you have to assume that god fudges with the physics so you can catch him
at it. Which means that all faiths on the world must assume a god would
interfere in a situation that you utterly and completely observed and
understood. Because otherwise there might be a true god from some religion who
just doesn't care about you.

