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A Priori — LessWrong

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Traditional Rationality is phrased as social rules, with violations interpretable as cheating: if you break the rules and no one else is doing so, you're the first to defect - making you a bad, bad person. To Bayesians, the brain is an engine of accuracy: if you violate the laws of rationality, the engine doesn't run, and this is equally true whether anyone else breaks the rules or not. Consider the problem of Occam's Razor, as confronted by Traditional philosophers. If two hypotheses fit the same observations equally well, why believe the simpler one is more likely to be true? You could argue that Occam's Razor has worked in the past, and is therefore likely to continue to work in the future. But this, itself, appeals to a prediction from Occam's Razor. "Occam's Razor works up to October 8th, 2007 and then stops working thereafter" is more complex, but it fits the observed evidence equally well. You could argue that Occam's Razor is a reasonable distribution on prior probabilities

x A Priori — LessWrong Physicalism 201 Priors Philosophy Truth, Semantics, & Meaning Bayesianism Occam's Razor Frontpage 98 A Priori by Eliezer Yudkowsky 8th Oct 2007 5 min read 133 98 Traditional Rationality is phrased as social rules, with violations interpretable as cheating: if you break the rules and no one else is doing so, you're the first to defect - making you a bad, bad person. To Bayesians, the brain is an engine of accuracy: if you violate the laws of rationality, the engine doesn't run , and this is equally true whether anyone else breaks the rules or not. Consider the problem of

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