Comment by YeGoblynQueenne
25 days ago
>> "Probability" does not mean "maybe yes, maybe not, let me assign some gut feeling value measuring how much I believe something to be the case."
That's exactly what Baeysian probabilities are: gut feelings. Speaking of values attached to random variables, a good Bayesian basically pulls their probabilities out their ass. Probabilities, in that context, are nothing but arbitrary degrees of belief based on other probabilities. That's the difference with the frequentist paradigm which attempts to set the values of probabilities by observing the frequency of events. Frequentists ... believe that observing frequencies is somehow more accurate than pulling degrees of belief out one's ass, but that's just a belief itself.
You can put a theoretical sheen on things by speaking of sets or probability spaces etc, but all that follows from the basic fact that either you choose to believe, or you choose to believe because data. In either case, reasoning under uncertainty is all about accepting the fact that there is always uncertainty and there is never complete certainty under any probabilistic paradigm.
Baffling to see such a take on HN.
If I give you a die and ask about the probabiliy for a 6, then it's exactly 1/6. Being able to quantify this exactly is the great success story of probability theory. You can have a different "gut feeling", and indeed many people do (lotteries are popular), but you would be wrong. If you run this experiment a large number of times, then about 1/6 of the outcomes will be a 6, proving the 1/6 right and the deviating "gut feeling" wrong. That number is not "pulled out of somebody's ass" or some frequentist approach. It's what probability means.
Yes, that's the frequentist approach. Surely, even on HN, there is an understanding that there are two interpretations of probability?
You don't think that the probability of each side of a die is 1/6 ?
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