Why I'm not a Bayesian - by Richard Ngo - Mind the Future

Philosophical objections to Bayesianism as an epistemology.

This post focuses on philosophical objections to Bayesianism as an epistemology. I first explain Bayesianism and some standard objections to it, then lay out my two main objections (inspired by ideas in philosophy of science). A follow-up post will speculate about how to formalize an alternative. The core idea of Bayesian epistemology: we should ideally reason by assigning credences to propositions which represent our degrees of belief that those propositions are true. (Note that this is different from Bayesianism as a set of statistical techniques, or Bayesianism as an approach to machine…

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