#109 - Vaden on The Bayesian Conspiracy [FULL UNEDITED DEBATE]

Vaden manages to penetrate deep into the rationalist stronghold in San Francisco, the Mecca of Yudkowsky himself, and - exactly as we'd all expect - gets into an epistemological standoff. Can he shake a Bayesian's credence in Bayesianism, or does he find in himself a Jaynesian acolyte, ready to make sure that no Dutchman is going to be able to mess with his books?

We discuss

• Critical rationalism vs. Bayesianism
• Toby Ord's doom estimates
• Asteroids vs. AI risk
• What probabilities measure
• Comparing made-up numbers
• Is probability a law?
• Cox's theorem and Dutch books
• COVID models and Monte Carlo
• AI expert surveys
• How we actually decide
• Bentham's Bulldog and Pascal's mugging
• Animal consciousness and vegetarianism
• Strong longtermism

References

• I Have Lost My Ability to be Charitable to Vaden (Eneasz Brodsky, Death Is Bad)
• The Bayesian Conspiracy ep. 273, "Vaden Masrani on... Critical Rationalism?"
• Death Is Bad, Eneasz's blog
• The Bayesian Conspiracy podcast
• Learning Bayesian Statistics ep. 160, "Bayesian Statistics vs Epistemology" (Alexandre Andorra with Vaden Masrani)
• Is P(Doom) Meaningful? Epistemology Debate with Vaden Masrani and Ben Chugg (Doom Debates, Liron Shapira; also Increments bonus ep. 76)
• Vaden's four-part longtermism series:
  1. A Case Against Strong Longtermism: A response to Hilary Greaves and William MacAskill (EA Forum version)
  2. Proving Too Much: A response to the EA forum
  3. The Credence Assumption: The paradoxes and problems with Cox's Theorem
  4. The Poverty of Longtermism: Why longtermism isn't an idea that could save one hundred billion trillion lives

Books and papers

• The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity (Toby Ord)
• The Case for Strong Longtermism (Hilary Greaves, William MacAskill) (GPI summary)
• Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years (Vaclav Smil, MIT Press, 2008)
• Conjectures and Refutations (Karl Popper)
• The Scout Mindset (Julia Galef)

What's your P(Vaden is Bad Faith)? Send your credence, and only your credence, over to incrementspodcast@gmail.com