Next weekend at EAGx Australia I'll be doing a live 80,000 Hours Podcast recording with philosopher Alan Hájek, who has spent his life studying the nature of probability, counterfactuals, Bayesianism, expected value and more.
What should I ask him?
He's he author of among other papers:
- Waging war on Pascal's wager
- The reference class problem is your problem too
- Interpretations of probability
- Arguments for—or against—Probabilism?
- Most counterfactuals are false
- The nature of uncertainty
Topics he'd likely be able to comment on include:
- problems with orthodox expected utility theory, especially involving infinite and undefined utilities or expectations
- risk aversion, whether it’s justified, and how best to spell it out
- how to set base rate priors for unknown quantities
- his heuristics for doing good philosophy (about which he has lots to say) / how to spot bad philosophical arguments
See more about Professor Hájek here: https://philosophy.cass.anu.edu.au/people/professor-alan-h-jek
Laplace's rule of succesion is often used by forecasters to set base rates. What does he think of that? Is this a good rule of thumb?
Moreover, Laplace's rule gives different results depending on how finely you subdivide time (eg saying that there has been one year of global pandemic in the last 20 years will give different results that if you say there has been 12 months of pandemic in the last 20*12 months). How should we account for that inconsistency when applying Laplace's law?
How should one aggregate different forecasts? Is External Bayesianity a compelling criteria for an aggregation procedure? How about marginalization?