Bayesian Quotes

“Although Ramsey's and de Finetti's accounts endowed an agent's probabilities with a purely subjective status they knew that, for from rendering those quantities scientifically valueless, the condition of consistency combined with the rule of conditionalization supports a powerful new epistemology called Bayesian epistemology. Its scientific appeal lies principally in two features: (i) so-called Bayesian networks are not only extremely powerful diagnostic tools but also provide the formal basis of some of the most revolutionary developments in AI; (ii) in fairly general circumstances agents with different initial, or prior, probability functions will, with enough new information, find their updated probabilities converging; in this way, it is claimed, objectivity is realized as an emergent property of consistent subjective assignments.”
― Colin Howson

“With Bayesian networks, we had taught machines to think in shades of grey, and this was an important step toward humanlike thinking. But we still couldn't teach machines to understand causes and effects. We couldn't explain to a computer why turning the dial of a barometer won't cause rain.... Without the ability to envision alternate realities and contrast them with the currently existing reality, a machine...cannot answer the most basic question that makes us human: "Why?”
― Judea Pearl, The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect

“But the point is one of probability: we all have a lifetime’s experience of the laws of nature not being broken, and we also have a lifetime’s experience of people saying things that are not true. If someone says, “I saw a dead man come back to life,” most of us would consider it more likely that that someone is wrong, or lying, than that they actually saw a dead man come back to life. So, says Hume, we should ignore that testimony as irrelevant.
But Price, newly armed with Bayes’ theorem, wanted to say that rare events do happen, and that even if you’ve seen the sun rise or the tide come in a million times, you can never be physically certain, in his phrase, that it’ll do so the next time”
― Tom Chivers