This is in contrast to a frequentist perspective, or maybe something close to a “common-sense” perspective, which tends to bucket knowledge into separate categories that aren’t easily interchangeable.
Many people make a mental separation between “thinking something is true” and “thinking something is X% likely, where X is high”, with one falling into the category of lived experience, and the other falling into the category of “scientific or probabilistic assessment”. The first one doesn’t require any externalizable evidence and is a fact about the mind, the second is part of a collaborative scientific process that has at its core repeatable experiments, or at least recurring frequencies (i.e. see the frequentist discussion of it being meaningless to assign probabilities to one-time events).
Under some of these other non-bayesian interpretations of probability theory, an assignment of probabilities is not valid if you don’t associate it with either an experimental setup, or some recurring frequency. So under those interpretations you do have an additional obligation to provide evidence and context to your probability estimates, since otherwise they don’t really form even a locally valid statement.
Thanks for that answer. So just to check, you essentially just meant that it’s ok to provide credences without saying your evidence—i.e., you’re not obligated to provide evidence when you provide credences? Not that there’s no added value to providing your evidence alongside your credences?
If so, I definitely agree.
(And it’s not that your original statement seemed to clearly say something different, just that I wasn’t sure that that’s all it was meant to mean.)
This is in contrast to a frequentist perspective, or maybe something close to a “common-sense” perspective, which tends to bucket knowledge into separate categories that aren’t easily interchangeable.
Many people make a mental separation between “thinking something is true” and “thinking something is X% likely, where X is high”, with one falling into the category of lived experience, and the other falling into the category of “scientific or probabilistic assessment”. The first one doesn’t require any externalizable evidence and is a fact about the mind, the second is part of a collaborative scientific process that has at its core repeatable experiments, or at least recurring frequencies (i.e. see the frequentist discussion of it being meaningless to assign probabilities to one-time events).
Under some of these other non-bayesian interpretations of probability theory, an assignment of probabilities is not valid if you don’t associate it with either an experimental setup, or some recurring frequency. So under those interpretations you do have an additional obligation to provide evidence and context to your probability estimates, since otherwise they don’t really form even a locally valid statement.
Thanks for that answer. So just to check, you essentially just meant that it’s ok to provide credences without saying your evidence—i.e., you’re not obligated to provide evidence when you provide credences? Not that there’s no added value to providing your evidence alongside your credences?
If so, I definitely agree.
(And it’s not that your original statement seemed to clearly say something different, just that I wasn’t sure that that’s all it was meant to mean.)
Yep, that’s what I was implying.