From a bayesian perspective there is no particular reason why you have to provide more evidence if you provide credences
I’m not sure I know what you mean by this.
I’d agree that you’re definitely not obligated to provide more evidence, and that your credence does fully capture how likely you think it is that X will happen.
But it seems to me that the evidence that informed your credence can also be very useful information for people, both in relation to how much they should update their own credences (as they may have info you lack regarding how relevant and valid those pieces of evidence are), and in relation to how—and how much—you might update your views (e.g., if they find out you just thought for 5 seconds and went with your gut, vs spending a year building expertise and explicit models). It also seems like sharing that evidence could help them with things like building their general models of the world or of how to make estimates.
(This isn’t an argument against giving explicit probabilities that aren’t based on much or that aren’t accompanied by explanations of what they’re based on. I’m generally, though tentatively, in favour of that. It just seems like also explaining what the probabilities are based on is often quite useful.)
(By the way, Beard et al. discuss related matters in the context of existential risk estimates, using the term “evidential reasoning”.)
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.)
I’m not sure I know what you mean by this.
I’d agree that you’re definitely not obligated to provide more evidence, and that your credence does fully capture how likely you think it is that X will happen.
But it seems to me that the evidence that informed your credence can also be very useful information for people, both in relation to how much they should update their own credences (as they may have info you lack regarding how relevant and valid those pieces of evidence are), and in relation to how—and how much—you might update your views (e.g., if they find out you just thought for 5 seconds and went with your gut, vs spending a year building expertise and explicit models). It also seems like sharing that evidence could help them with things like building their general models of the world or of how to make estimates.
(This isn’t an argument against giving explicit probabilities that aren’t based on much or that aren’t accompanied by explanations of what they’re based on. I’m generally, though tentatively, in favour of that. It just seems like also explaining what the probabilities are based on is often quite useful.)
(By the way, Beard et al. discuss related matters in the context of existential risk estimates, using the term “evidential reasoning”.)
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.
This statement is just incorrect.