Here is a presentation (in spanish) on rationality for skepticamp I’ve worked on recently. It needs some polish but the content is essentially complete. A summary of the main points
- Provides a quantitative model of the scientific method as a special case of Bayes theorem
- Provides operational, quantitative definitions of belief and evidence
- Naturally relates predictive power and falsifiability through the sum rule of probability
- Explains pathological beliefs of the vacuous kind; astrology, card reading, divination, etc
- Explains pathological beliefs of the floating kind; “There is a dragon in my garage”
- Exposes fraudulent retrodiction; astrology, cold reading, ad-hoc hypothesis, bad science, bad economics, etc
- Dissolves false disagreements described by matching predictions but different verbal formulations
- Naturally embeds empiricism, positivism and falsificationism
Recommended reading
Probability Theory: The Logic of Science
Bayesian Theory (Wiley Series in Probability and Statistics)
Hume’s Problem: Induction and the Justification of Belief
Various papers
Bayesian probability – Bruyninckx(2002)
Philosophy and the practice of Bayesian statistics – Gelman(2011)
Varieties of Bayesianism – Weisberg
No Free Lunch versus Occam’s Razor in Supervised Learning – Lattimore, Hutter(2011)
A Material Theory of Induction – Norton(2002)
Bayesian epistemology – Hartmann, Sprenger(2010)
The Illusion of Ambiguity: from Bistable Perception to Anthropomorphism – Ghedini(2011)
Bayesian Rationality and Decision Making: A Critical Review – Albert(2003)
Why Bayesian Rationality Is Empty, Perfect Rationality Doesn’t Exist, Ecological Rationality Is Too Simple, and Critical Rationality Does the Job* – Albert(2009)
A Better Bayesian Convergence Theorem – Hawthorne
Bayesian epistemology (stanford)
lesswrong.com (excellent blog on rationality)