From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sat May 28 2005 - 20:59:56 MDT
Paul Fidika wrote:
>
> Oh god no! Hopefully no one on this list wastes their time
> doing such a thing! A word of advice: don't waste your time
> with the "philosophy of science". (1) Bayes already presents a
> solution to the "problem" of induction. (2) Bayes presents a
> quantitative "Occam's Razor", obviating the need for determining
> which hypothesis is simpler.
Er, (1) isn't quite true. To get induction out of Bayes, you need Solomonoff
induction, Minimum-Description-Length, or some other way of assigning prior
probabilities that assigns lower probabilities to more complex hypotheses.
> The applied Bayesian-statistician daily makes use of these
> solutions, while the philosophers will continue to argue about
> these solved problems for decades to come.
>
> When you have the calculus of science, of what use is the
> philosophy of it?
The calculus of intelligence isn't finished. Don't judge the usefulness of
philosophy by philosophers. Some are good, some are bad, and I'll be damned
if I see how Jaynes could have written Probability Theory: The Logic of
Science without a touch of philosophy here and there. The moral is: know ye
the math, use ye the math, and complain ye not about the math until thou
master it fully.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://intelligence.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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