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John Quiggin's avatar

I got this, just as I was sitting down to work on a paper about syntactic and semantic approaches to uncertainty and unawareness. Here's a link to a current draft

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/clso6ejrmpgg3f6eciip2/Translation-10.pdf?rlkey=h4pg70g04k86f5sxchm95ym93&dl=0

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Ben Recht's avatar

Not Meehl related, but translation as a foundational building block of meaning has been a recent obsession of mine. Adding your paper to my queue. Thanks!

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Maxim Raginsky's avatar

This paper takes me back -- all the ideas related to connecting lattice-theoretic and probabilistic notions of uncertainty, plus the references to Halpern, Gilboa-Schmeidler, etc.

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John Quiggin's avatar

We’ve been working on this for a long time, and there are still basic issues unresolved. But I think we have made some progress here.

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galen's avatar

So when there's stuff like the AI Impacts survey asking people to estimate probabilities, and then they do statistics over those probabilities, is that doing type 2 over type 1? Is there a name for this... technique 🤔

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Ben Recht's avatar

I think it's called "Doomerism."

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Rob Nowak's avatar

I guess Bayesians would say that both are equally fundamental to understanding the unknown.

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Ben Recht's avatar

Frequentists would agree! The two differ in how you move between the two. More on this topic coming later this week.

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Maxim Raginsky's avatar

As I was listening to that lecture, I kept nodding in agreement because I articulated more or less the same dichotomy here: https://realizable.substack.com/p/probabilities-coherence-correspondence.

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Maxim Raginsky's avatar

By the way, at one point Meehl recommends two chapters from Vic Barnett’s book on comparative statistical inference as a good reference on the interpretations of probability. Check them out if you haven’t already, they are excellent.

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Ben Recht's avatar

Yeah, Barnett's book is excellent cover to cover. Have you read Hacking's "Logic of Statistical Inference?" Also great at picking at the dappled nature of inference. And I also really like Wesley Salmon's discussion of the problem of probability in "The Foundations of Scientific Inference."

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Maxim Raginsky's avatar

I've leafed through Hacking. Currently making my way through Mary Hesse's "Structure of Scientific Inference," which is (like Hesse in general) hugely underrated.

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Ben Recht's avatar

What I like about Barnett, Hacking, and Salmon is I walked away more confused but also more relaxed. The statistical dogmatists are much more stressful to read.

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