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A comment on The Raven Paradox (logic). Parent comment

Re:The Raven Paradox (logic) by jey on Sunday January 13, 2008 @03:39PM (#97955)
"If we had all things in the universe available and sufficiently defined to tell what is one thing and what is another, and we found that there are indeed no non-black ravens, that would still leave open the question of whether there could possibly be non-black ravens in the future."

That's not a bug in Bayesian inference, that's a feature! It would be a mistake to ever assign a probability of 0.0 or 1.0 to any statement. It means you have infinite confidence in the statement, which is impossible unless you have a screwy prior distribution.

You also don't have to evaluate all of the data if you're giving a probability. You can just report your degree of confidence in the proposition based on the data you've evaluated so far, and this degree of confidence is called a probability.

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Re:The Raven Paradox (logic) by fauigerzigerk on Sunday January 13, 2008 @05:55PM (#97992)
I know the whole point of Bayesian statistics is that you actually need much less data to get a good prediction. But the edge case I was talking about is still interesting I think, if not as a criticism of Bayes.
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