[FRIAM] Breaking Bad and Free Will

[Steve Smith]

I just learned about the work of De Finetti who apparently added the 
notion of "subjective probability" to the extant body of Bayesian 
probability at the time (1937).   "Probability is not about the system 
but rather about your knowledge of the system"...

 From Wikipedia

    *Bruno de Finetti*(13 June 1906 – 20 July 1985) was an
    Italianprobabilist
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_probabilists>statistician
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistician>andactuary
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actuary>, noted for the "operational
    subjective" conception ofprobability
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability>. The classic exposition
    of his distinctive theory is the 1937/"La prévision: ses lois
    logiques, ses sources subjectives"/,^[1]
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_de_Finetti#cite_note-1> which
    discussed probability founded on the coherence of betting odds and
    the consequences ofexchangeability
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchangeability>.





	

	

	

	

	


	

On 1/26/24 11:46 AM, glen wrote:

> The concept of causality is so irritating. It's like some kind of 
> cafeteria style religion, where you pick and choose whatever attribute 
> you like and toss all the attributes you dislike. So Marcus' 
> identification of uncorrelated observations speaks directly to SteveS' 
> assignation of an independent trajectory mutation at each pin in the 
> game. The trajectory isn't random, but each turn in the trajectory is 
> random. Similar with the difference between determinism and 
> prestatability. Similar with the difference between causal chains 
> versus causal networks.
>
> All this is simply to torque my arm out of place patting myself on the 
> back again. What matters is the *scope*, not some penultimate 
> reduction to some Grand Unified Theory/Philosophy of the world. Nobody 
> can say anything coherent without mentioning the scope of whatever it 
> was they said ... the language within which they said it, etc.
>
>
> On 1/26/24 07:37, Steve Smith wrote:
>> I've only dropped a few Pachinko balls in my life, but I couldn't 
>> help agonizing over the trajectory of each one, feeling as if at 
>> every bounce they were at risk of "breaking bad" (or "good")...   
>> since many here are at least part-time simulants (as Glen I believe 
>> refers to himself), even the most aggressive attempts at introducing 
>> "random" (noise, annealing, etc.) either degenerate to 
>> "pseudo-random" or engage with a physical system (e.g. sample a 
>> pixel-value from a webcam trained on a lava lamp) which of course is 
>> deterministic if arbitrarily complex.
>
> On 1/26/24 08:14, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> One of the usual claims is that science couldn’t occur without 
>> independent observations.   I would co-opt Glen’s rhetoric here about 
>> parallax.  What’s need is largely uncorrelated observations.
>
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