Why Bayes? A Wise Ruling

The bit about that that's bothering me is "sapient" is a term of art -- it's science fiction shorthand employed with a purpose (it denotes personhood for the reader, in a field where blatantly-nonhuman but unambiguously-personlike entities are common). It divides the field of hypothetical entities into two neat, clean categories: people no matter what their substrate, appearance, anatomy or drives, and everything from animals of every sort to plants and grains of sand.

It just seems like a weird way of dividing up the world, and more of a cultural artefact than anything; a marker on the map which corresponds to nothing in the territory.

"Soul", gotcha. Binary personhood marker. Reified concept not sufficiently unpacked. Okie.

I respectfully disagree, sapience is an acquired subjective quality, therefore it is trivial to disregard. Now sentience is orders of magnitude more complex. I was going to say “inherent” to the species, but is it? Now this is supposed to be “the easy problem” go figure that.

1 presumes that minimalist descriptions of superficially-visible output are all you need to reconstruct the actual drivers behind the behavior. 2 presumes that the evolutionarily-shared neural architecture and its basic components of perception, cognition and soforth are not seperated by a barrier of magical reality fluid.

Basically what I asked Eliezer: What sense of the word "sentient" is he using, such that babies plausibly don't qualify? My de facto read of the term and a little digging around Google show two basic senses:

-Possessing sensory experiences (I'm pretty sure insects and even worms do that)
-SF/F writer's term for "assume this fictional entity is a person" (akin to "sapient"; it's a binary personhood marker, or a secularized soul -- it tells the reader to react accordingly to this character's experiences and behavior)

The latter, applied to the real world, sounds rather more like "soul" than anything coherent and obvious. The former, denied in babies, sounds bizarre and obviously untrue. So...I'm missing something, and I'd like to know what it is.

My desires concerning what my desires should be are also determined by my desires, so your question is not valid, it's a recursive loop. You are first assuming that I care about anything at all, secondly assuming that I experience guilt at all, and thirdly that I would care about my children. As it turns out, you are correct on all three assumptions, just keep in mind that those are not always givens among humans.

What I was saying was that in the two situations (my child dies due to SIDS), and (my child dies due to me rolling over onto him), in the first situation not only could I trick myself into believing it wasn't my fault, it's also completely possible that it really wasn't my fault, and that it had some other cause; in the second situation, there's really no question, and a very concrete way to prevent it.

To answer your unasked question, I still do not alieve that keeping my child a safe distance away while sleeping but showing love and care at all other times increases her chance of SIDS. If I was to be shown conclusive research of cause and effect between them, I would reverse my current opinion, mos' def.

I'm involved in a local Native American community and one of the medicine elders I know often makes a sort of device for families with infant children, especially ones with colic or other sleep-disrupting conditions. It's kind of a cradle-sling type thing you hang securely above your own bed; if kiddo's crying but otherwise okay you can just reach up and rock them, and they're otherwise within reach. I've seen replicas of the pre-contact version, and even made of birchbark and hung from the rafters of a lodge with sinew it's evidently still quite sturdy and safe; like, you'd have to knock over the house for it to be an issue. These days, using modern materials, they're even safer. So this goes back quite a long way.

Then I still blame the mother in the story for not building one of those!

That is pretty neat, I wholeheartedly endorse using those, just in case. In the unlikely event that I produce more biological offspring, I will make use of that knowledge.

Well, worthless is a mild exaggeration, but Eliezer has argued that eating babies is justified if they're young enough. Infanticide (or "post-natal abortion") is approved of by a small but real minority. I have yet to encounter anyone who thinks toddlers are equivalent to animals (who doesn't use this to argue for animals' rights) but I assume they exist as a minority of a minority. But if they can talk, most people are convinced. (This does not apply to sign language, for some reason.)

Does that answer your question?

We have some XKCD fans here, I see.

To the extent that there is a difference between Bayesians and Frequentists, it's a disagreement about interpretations, not math. It's not like Frequentists disagree with P(H|E) = P(E|H)*P(H)/P(E), or have sworn not to use it!

There are at least two meanings to the Bayesian/frequentist debate; one is a disagreement about methods (or at least a different set of tools), and the other is a disagreement about the deeper meaning of probability. This is an article about methods, not meaning. The major difference is that Bayesian methods make the prior explicit. The p-value is, perhaps, the quintessential frequentist statistic. Here, we can easily imagine Solomon publishing his paper in the Ancient Journal of Statistical Law and citing a p-value < 0.001 -- but without knowing the actual P(defendant), we don't know how many times he made the correct decision (in terms of the facts; as noted in another thread, from a child-welfare perspective, the decision was probably correct regardless).

What I would call the three main components of Bayes are explicitly considering hypotheses, explicitly searching for tests with high likelihood ratios, rather than just high likelihoods, and explicitly incorporating prior information. I'm content with examples that show off only one of those components.

Frequentists also care about high likelihood ratios.