I was baffled by the shamelessly non-critical way my university stats course presented Bayesian inference. To transition smoothly from all the ways that we have to use data to produce compelling and realistic results and move on to… Numerical confidence in a belief… Seemed utterly ridiculous. Why include the belief at all? It just seems to me like you’re introducing your own biases into actual data.
Software you write can have a “belief” as well. The course I took on it had us write Kalman filters, where you start with some estimate of a quantity. That estimate is your “belief”, and you have a variance as well.
Each measurement you have a (value, variance) where the variance is derived from the quality of the sensor that produced it.
It’s an overloaded word because humans are often unwilling to update their beliefs unless they are simple things, like “I believe the forks are in the drawer to the right of the sink”. You believe that because you think you saw them their last. There is uncertainty - you might have misremembered, as your own memory is unreliable, your eyes are unreliable. If it’s your kitchen and you’ve had thousands of observations, your belief has low uncertainty, if it’s a new place your belief has high uncertainty.
If you go and look right now and the forks are in fact there you update your beliefs.
I think you can be sure we’ve all suffered sufficient Sequences to get this
Software you write can have a “belief” as well. The course I took on it had us write Kalman filters, where you start with some estimate of a quantity. That estimate is your “belief”, and you have a variance as well.
this is an abuse of language. words have meanings, and those aren’t them. To be clear, are you claiming the course taught you that software has beliefs, or is this a projection of your beliefs onto the course material?
No literally the course material has the word “belief”. It means “at this instant what is the estimate of ground truth”.
Those shaky blue lines that show where your Tesla on autopilot thinks the lane is? That’s it’s belief.
English and software have lots of overloaded terms.
