Sean Carroll

Is this me being anthropocentric or do you think that there's some truth there?

I think there's some truth to that.

Yeah, okay, that does make sense.

And back to the probabilities and the beliefs.

My podcast listeners hear me talk about Bayesian reasoning all the time.

Is that what we're talking about here?

And I know that Bayes himself just sort of, I guess, was it even posthumously published, his formula?

So he was not a big player in that discussion, but we give him some credit.

So would it be fair to say that, at least roughly speaking, pre-Beyes and Laplace, you could gamble, there could be uncertainties and things like that.

But when it came to thinking, you were supposed to be right or wrong.

And after them, you could say, well, I have a certain degree of confidence in my beliefs.

So let's dig into that theory of what we could call thought.

We have some beliefs.

They're probabilistic.

How do you reason with them in the way that Boole would have had us reasoning with true and false statements?

And just like we can question how

conventionally logical people are.

We can also question how good they are at updating their beliefs when new data come in.

I mean, so maybe should we think about perfect Bayesian reasoning as, once again, aspirational when it comes to laws of thought?

Or is this meant to be a description of how people actually think?