BC PROBABILITY

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Simon DeDeo
@SimonDeDeo 3 years, 8 months ago 687 views

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So—probability. Do we really need it? This has been on my mind since 2017, when I finally sat down to think through quantum theory. (/n)

One thing that’s always struck me is how *late* probability theory came in intellectual history. We had integral calculus before we had probability. And probability is insanely simple, mathematically!

I’m tempted to say that probability theory is not, in fact, Lindy. Frequentist probability is (for all the usual reasons) best understood as a heuristic. Bayesian interpretations, by contrast, take the remarkable step of tying it to mental states.

You have to work very hard to convince yourself that beliefs really are “degrees of belief in sets of events” (or whatever). It’s not natural—and I won’t rehearse the whole story about rational choice and decision theory...

So with those critiques in the back of my mind, when I read David Wallace’s decision-theoretic account of the Born Rule I was rather primed to say, hey, so what? Meaning...

Not that it wasn’t great. But that now I was even more skeptical about the “classical”—meaning probabilistic—world as a real thing.

It made me think that there wasn’t really a classical world to “get right” to begin with. (Perhaps this is QBism?)

The one thing that puzzles me, though, is that my experience of reality *seems* probabilistic. There’s a bunch of reasonably predictable medium-sized stuff.

So perhaps the real puzzle is this: why is probability theory a really natural thing for perception, but not for higher mental states where (IMO) things are obviously getting weird (see, e.g., the Linda problem).

Probabilistic models work great for perception (see, e.g., the generative autoencoders, etc). But not for higher thought (representation of concepts).

This is about as epistemically edgy as I can get. Doubting that my beliefs are really “degrees of credence in sets of events” is fine, but that seems to lead to saying there’s no such a thing as the classical reality of coin tosses.

Having come of age in the 1990s (i.e., well after the hippies that saved physics degenerated into Omni Magazine) I was whipped into not taking the philosophical implications of quantum theory seriously. A little fuzz at the atomic level shouldn’t matter!

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This is the first deletion, back in 2014. A bit hard to read between the lines, but the basic story that an admin had Stickland's page "speedy deleted"—i.e., deleted without debate. The method was something called Copyright Jujitsu.

In particular, the admin had the page deleted not because of notability, but because it included a photograph of Strickland that had ambiguous copyright status. This is a method that people developed to get rid of content they didn't want, but also didn't want to debate.

"Copyright Jujitsu" because it is usually used against spam from companies; a PR officer uploads promotional material to Wikipedia. Instead of debating whether it's neutral, the admin can say "we'd love to have it, but the material appears to violate your company's copyright".

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It was pretty simple to do—Apple Time Machine backups let me do it with one click.

That first tweet captures, in two pictures, how badly Apple has “lost the plot” (to quote @wylieprof). On the right is the Apple MagSafe adapter, from 2013. On the left, what I had “upgraded” to.

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"I lied about my basic beliefs in order to keep a prestigious job. Now that it will be zero-cost to me, I have a few things to say."

As a dean of a major academic institution, I could not have said this. But I will now. Requiring such statements in applications for appointments and promotions is an affront to academic freedom, and diminishes the true value of diversity, equity of inclusion by trivializing it. https://t.co/NfcI5VLODi
— Jeffrey Flier (@jflier) November 10, 2018

We know that elite institutions like the one Flier was in (partial) charge of rely on irrelevant status markers like private school education, whiteness, legacy, and ability to charm an old white guy at an interview.

Harvard's discriminatory policies are becoming increasingly well known, across the political spectrum (see, e.g., the recent lawsuit on discrimination against East Asian applications.)

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Imagine for a moment the most obscurantist, jargon-filled, po-mo article the politically correct academy might produce. Pure SJW nonsense. Got it? Chances are you're imagining something like the infamous "Feminist Glaciology" article from a few years back.https://t.co/NRaWNREBvR pic.twitter.com/qtSFBYY80S
— Jeffrey Sachs (@JeffreyASachs) October 13, 2018

The article is, at heart, deeply weird, even essentialist. Here, for example, is the claim that proposing climate engineering is a "man" thing. Also a "man" thing: attempting to get distance from a topic, approaching it in a disinterested fashion.

Also a "man" thing—physical courage. (I guess, not quite: physical courage "co-constitutes" masculinist glaciology along with nationalism and colonialism.)

There's criticism of a New York Times article that talks about glaciology adventures, which makes a similar point.

At the heart of this chunk is the claim that glaciology excludes women because of a narrative of scientific objectivity and physical adventure. This is a strong claim! It's not enough to say, hey, sure, sounds good. Is it true?

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