Bayes
Article
Bayes is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between April 01, 2022 and May 30, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Bayes was a minister”; “Thirty years before you had heard of Bayes, Herbert had tapped into an assumption”; “Bayes is a great excuse to think with other people”. It most often appears alongside 3Blue1Brown, ACX, Aella.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: April 01, 2022
- Last seen: May 30, 2025
Appears In
- The Low-Hanging Fruit Argument: Models And Predictions
- Your Book Review: God Emperor Of Dune
- Bayes For Everyone
Related Pages
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- 3Blue1Brown (1 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
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- Aella (1 shared issues)
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- AI (1 shared issues)
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- Alasdair MacIntyre (1 shared issues)
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- ancient aliens (1 shared issues)
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- ancient Greeks (1 shared issues)
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- Apollonian (1 shared issues)
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- Arakeen (1 shared issues)
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- Arakeen sandtrout (1 shared issues)
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- Arakis (1 shared issues)
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- Atreides (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
In the early days of science, many discoveries were made by lucky amateurs. Van Leeuwanhoek was a businessman; Lavoisier was an aristocrat and politician, Bayes was a minister, Franklin was a printer/author/inventor/socialite/ambassador/postmaster/firefighter/musician/philanthropist/Founding Father. Nowadays there are very occasional discoveries by amateurs (eg de Grey on chromatic number) but they seem much less frequent.
Inline links: de Grey on chromatic number
First, I think it’s an interesting example of prescience on Herbert’s part. Thirty years before you had heard of Bayes, Herbert had tapped into an assumption that seemed so clear to him he didn’t realize he should spend more time explaining it to you: that any development of AI or AI-like programs would logically (if not actually) eventually result in an AI that held views so profoundly counter to the needs of humanity that it would wipe us out in pursuit of them.
Egan suggests a more helpful tact: look at where the skill came from. Who first created it? I.I.: I’ve looked deeply into the life and times of the Reverend and Learned Thomas Bayes, Master of Arts, Fellow of the Royal Society, and I’ve come up with nothing. Then look at who developed Bayesianism further. What community championed it? What sorts of things were driving them? Dear reader, we are that community! And why did we throw ourselves into Bayesian reasoning so fully? Certainly different people can give different answers, but my understanding is that many of us got interested in order to win online arguments against morons. My own start wasn’t particularly “relevant” to anything else I was doing: I got into Bayes to debate the historicity of Jesus. The people I see using it the most these days are mostly partisans (on both sides) of the God wars.
It probably won’t surprise you that I think part of the answer is Bayes’ theorem. But the equation is famously prickly and off-putting:
Over the years quite a few folks have attempted to explain it clearly. Eliezer wrote his famous essay back in 2003 (which Khalid Azad helpfully summarized in 2007), Scott’s written about it a number of times, Steven Pinker takes a whack at it in Rationality, Julia Galef speaks about it on BigThink, and so on and so forth. Recently, there’s even been a book explaining Bayes to babies. Bayesianism has become quite a racket!