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Probability is in the Mind — LessWrong

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Yesterday I spoke of the Mind Projection Fallacy, giving the example of the alien monster who carries off a girl in a torn dress for intended ravishing—a mistake which I imputed to the artist's tendency to think that a woman's sexiness is a property of the woman herself, woman.sexiness, rather than something that exists in the mind of an observer, and probably wouldn't exist in an alien mind. The term "Mind Projection Fallacy" was coined by the late great Bayesian Master, E. T. Jaynes, as part of his long and hard-fought battle against the accursèd frequentists. Jaynes was of the opinion that probabilities were in the mind, not in the environment—that probabilities express ignorance, states of partial information; and if I am ignorant of a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon. I cannot do justice to this ancient war in a few words—but the classic example of the argument runs thus: You have a coin. The coin is biased. You don't know which w

x Probability is in the Mind — LessWrong Reductionism 101 Bayesianism Bayes' Theorem Map and Territory Mind projection fallacy Rationality Frontpage 152 Probability is in the Mind by Eliezer Yudkowsky 12th Mar 2008 7 min read 227 152 Yesterday I spoke of the Mind Projection Fallacy, giving the example of the alien monster who carries off a girl in a torn dress for intended ravishing—a mistake which I imputed to the artist's tendency to think that a woman's sexiness is a property of the woman herself, woman.sexiness , rather than something that exists in the mind of an observer, and probably wo

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