This book (available as a free pdf here) is one of the foundational texts for Rationalists; Eliezer refers to Jaynes as The Level Above Mine. While we agree that Jaynes is very lucid and the book is wonderful, we also think the book's target audience are graduate physics students. It occupies a sparse area of the literature, between statistics, math, causality, and philosophy of science that contains real, practical lessons about how to think about the world and its uncertainty. Here, we will try to give a review where we share the core insight of the book while skipping all the integrals and derivations. The book is basically 50% high level math and 50% cool stories and rants that you can mostly understand without the math. It also covers a lot of material, and this review covers just the first 6 chapters, which introduces the fundamental concepts and problems.

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Outline:

(01:14) Part 1: A new Foundation of Probability Theory

(01:55) Chapter 1: Plausible Reasoning

(05:18) Chapter 2: The Quantitative Rules

(10:34) Part 2: Basic Statistics reinvented

(10:40) Chapter 3: Elementary sampling theory

(15:03) Chapter 4: Elementary hypothesis testing

(21:14) Chapter 5: Queer uses for probability theory

(27:25) Chapter 6: Elementary Parameter Estimation

(35:41) Personal opinions

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First published:
December 27th, 2023

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KN3BYDkWei9ADXnBy/e-t-jaynes-probability-theory-the-logic-of-science-i

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“E.T. Jaynes Probability Theory: The logic of Science I” by Jan Christian Refsgaard, dentalperson

LessWrong (30+ Karma)