that’s just what bayesian inference means in this context, so it’s key for someone like savage. bayesians are everywhere tbh. many of them probably wouldn’t have known who yudkowsky is until sometime post-chatgpt.
if you want something distinctive from yudkowsky, maybe it would be the practical emphasis he puts on ai alignment. but that would require some genealogy as well.
yes, updating your beliefs has been a fundamental part of bayesian epistemology and inference from the beginning. but that’s all beside the point.
what i can’t figure out is how even a critical reader (like you) could be led to believe yudkowsky had anything to do with developing those and many other ideas.
it says so much that gyges, in a highly critical post, suggests that the basic bayesian term “priors” originates in or owes anything to yudkowsky (cf. Edwards, Lindman, Savage 1963 below). what of rationalism isn’t like this?
An attempt to document important facts concerning AI Safety, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationalism and San Francisco Effective Altruism
verysane.ai/p/ai-safety-is-m…
i don’t disagree with this part! i tried to make that clear-ish above, but it wasn’t clear enough.
my point is, if what you care about is truth and falsity, both kinds of statement involve predicating something false of academic works. the former predicates something basically false of a whole academic discipline, including all the papers and works in it. that does seem worse in many ways than a single misattribution. what i’m saying to you is that giving his behavior a pass on that question seems incompatible with valuing the philosophical tradition more generally, which i assume you do to some extent.