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Understanding Subjective Probabilities

outsidetheasylum.blog · 4,508 words · saved by 1 readers

Any time a controversial prediction about the future comes up, there's a type of interaction that's pretty much guaranteed to happen. Alice: "I think this thing is 20% likely to occur." Bob: "Huh? How could you know that. You just made that number up!". Or in slightly more technical Twitterese: That is, any time someone attempts to provide a specific numerical probability on a future event, they'll inundated with claims that that number is meaningless, and they just made it up. Is this true? Does it make sense to assign probabilities to things in the real world? If so, how do we calculate them? The traditional interpretation of probability is known as physical probability, with two main variants: frequentist probability and propensity probability. Under frequentism, the chance of an event happening is equal to the fraction of times it's occurred among all similar events in the past. Under the propensity interpretation, items have some intrinsic "quality" of being some % likely to do on

Understanding Subjective Probabilities Understanding Subjective Probabilities Any time a controversial prediction about the future comes up, there's a type of interaction that's pretty much guaranteed to happen. Alice: "I think this thing is 20% likely to occur." Bob: "Huh? How could you know that. You just made that number up!". Or in slightly more technical Twitterese: Our posteriors come from our priors, but our priors come from our posteriors. - Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦 (@Noahpinion) June 10, 2021 That is, any time someone attempts to provide a specific numerical probability on a future event

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