And then when the war goes bad and hindsight bias tells us it was a terrible idea all along, you can just say “Yes, people like me were happy to acknowledge the excellent arguments about the war. It was just you guys being fanatics about it all the time which turned everyone else off.””

Scott, are you ever going to explain your Deep Insights into this sort of thing? You’ve been talking about the plight of us low-social-skills … people a lot recently. Any chance you’ll ever share these advanced social skills you learned during your Five Thousand Years?

Obviously, some of these techniques may be evil. But you have unparalleled access to the rationalist community, so I’m guessing the instrumental value could be high.

Oh, and I’m crazy curious, of course. Hmm, I think I’ll ask this on a few posts in the hope it’ll be seen.

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On a charitable interpretation of pop Bayesianism, its message is: “Everyone needs to understand basic probability theory!” That is a sentiment I agree with violently. I think most people could understand probability, and it should be taught in high school. It’s not really difficult, and it’s incredibly valuable.

So yeah, it’s possible that I do think CFAR’s mission is more important than you do! I agree that probably <1% of people are able to apply basic probability theory, and that's a disaster.

It's likely that differing ideas about the scope of "rationality" and "epistemology" are part of the confusion and apparent disagreement here. We could hash out different definitions, but I'm not sure how productive that would be.

Maybe as an alternative you could check out my follow-up post which is about a broader conception of rationality/epistemology, and see what you think.

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The post is a very crude map of a broader world: how to think effectively and accurately. (“Rationality,” in other words.) Bayes is one island in that archipelago; the post marks the approximate locations, and vague shapes, of some others.

I hope this out will be interesting and useful to the LW community. Unfortunately, I was writing in a hurry, to make a timely response to Scott‘s post here, so it’s much less thought-through, and much longer, than I would like.

In any case, comments are very welcome!

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If you follow the IPCC report the correct belief in global warming is something between p=0.9 and p=0.99.
At the same time we have people walking around claiming that the evidence for global warming is similar to the evidence we have for evolution.

Our evidence for evolution is better than p=0.99. The only way you can believe that the evidence for both claims is the same is through black and white thinking.

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Wait wait wait wait wait what?

My guess is maybe less than 1% of humans and less than 10% of people who consider themselves epistemologists/philosophers of knowledge/et cetera have ever even heard of Bayes. Does that sound wrong to you? Like, if you believe using a wrench is “uncontroversially” “indispensible”, and that only a tiny subset of mechanics has any idea wrenches exist let alone how to use them, aren’t you positing CFAR et cetera are hugely important, probably even more important than I would be willing to?

Also, it’s possible we have different definitions for “epistemology”. You say above that “‘Epistemology’ is figuring out what is true or useful.”

If that’s true, I agree Bayes is only a small part of the picture (albeit an important part, something you seem to agree with).

However, I define epistemology more theoretically, something like “the study of what the heck knowledge even means, and whether it is possible in theory to obtain it”. If that’s true, do you agree that Bayes and the idea of probabilistic knowledge become a much bigger part of the “solution” to “epistemology”?

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I also agree that we’ve taken the discussion as far we can in the absence of either (a) an actual critique of Bayesianism or (b) a sketch of what a broader epistemology might look like.

I’m working on (b). I don’t have much time, so instead of being a systematic account, it will be a collection of anecdotes about experiences in auto repair, so to speak. I’ll talk about ways that different tools were useful in solving particular problems.

Maybe after I’ve posted that, your reaction will be “but Bayes is still most of what you need!” in which case I will politely differ.

Or maybe you’ll say “oh, I see—we were just talking about different things—my interest is strictly in adjusting belief strength, not in epistemology broadly, so Bayes is all I care about; but I can see why you’d find other tools interesting.”

Or maybe you’ll say “Oh! Now I get it! We do need screwdrivers and pliers and many other tools, and they are no more or less important than wrenches. You have to use several to get any major job done.”

There actually aren’t any Wrenchists, because everyone would agree that knowing how to use a wrench is indispensable, so that’s uncontroversial, but also learning to use a wrench isn’t terribly difficult, and by itself it isn’t terribly useful. I feel the same way about Bayes.

@ Tenoke — I think Marc may have been referring to my saying:

For Bayesian methods to even apply, you have to have already defined the space of possible evidence-events and possible hypotheses and (in a decision theoretic framework) possible actions. The universe doesn’t come pre-parsed with those. Choosing the vocabulary in which to formulate evidence, hypotheses, and actions is most of the work of understanding something. Bayesianism gives you no help with that. Thus, I expect it predisposes you take someone else’s wrong vocabulary as given.

That was in a discussion with Kaj Sotala on my blog.

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