Truth and Probability (1926) [pdf]

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67 points·dedalus··4 comments

It's sad that Ramsey died so young. It's also sad that it has taken nearly a century for the wider culture/society to begin embracing the concept of 'degrees of belief' in any significant way (I could definitely be wrong, but it seems to me that it is being embraced more). A number of public intellectuals have said probabilistic reasoning is king for the forseeable future (of course, such reasoning is a bit different from the ground being covered by degrees of belief). I know some professors who are even moving away from the emphasis on deductive reasoning in introductory logic courses.

My brief exposure to this was frustrated with the complex math involved in combining (adding/multiplying) probability distributions without simulations.

Something so fundamental to making probabilistic choices is so immediately daughnting from a programmatic point of view

I bet with more exposure it would become more intuitive. I also think there is simply an immense benefit in the type of epistemological mindset it inculcates, regardless of how fast or adept you are at the mechanics.

I did a module in "philosophy of probability" and we covered this. At the beginning, I thought it was all people arguing about nothing in a lot of words, but after 3 weeks I realised that my assumptions that probability is a fairly 'rigid' field were way too strong and there is still so much that is not understood or controversial.

This is a really interesting field and I would encourage anyone to make the effort to dive into it beyond the surface

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