I’ve started reading Jaynes’ book on probability theory, to get a better sense of how objective Bayesians think about things. One thing I found interesting (and a bit frustrating) was his argument for the “indifference principle”, stating that, conditional on background information that says nothing about possibility A without also saying it about possibility B, A and B must have the same probability.
The argument for this principle is quite interesting. He starts with the premise that a rational agent (or “robot”, as he often calls it) must assign probabilities to outcomes just based on the information about them, and that the probabilities should be the same in situations with identical information. Thus, if there are two propositions about which the information says nothing different, we can interchange them and end up in an identical situation to how we started, so the probabilities assigned must be the same. It’s a nice little argument, but I think it relies on a missing premise, which states that given any background information, there is a set of probabilities that it is uniquely right to assign – if many probability assignments are all allowed (as most subjective Bayesians will say), then this argument won’t entail that they all have to obey the indifference principle, as long as every permissible assignment with one asymmetry has a corresponding permissible assignment with the other asymmetry.
What makes me more suspicious about this indifference principle is how Jaynes actually goes on to use it. He says that using it requires the background information about the different propositions to actually be identical, but his very first use of it violates this condition!
Consider the traditional ‘Bernoulli urn’ of probability theory; ours is known to contain ten balls of identical size and weight, labeled {1,2,…,10}. Three balls (numbers 4, 6, 7) are black, the other seven are white. We are to shake the urn and draw one ball blindfolded. The background information … consists of the statements in the last two sentences. What is the probability that we draw a black one? (p. 42)
Of course, he goes on to say that the probability is 3/10 (which is obviously the “right” answer in some sense), because “the background information is indifferent to these ten possibilities”, so each ball has probability 1/10 of being drawn, and we can add the three chances for a black ball, since the background information entails that they are mutually exclusive events.
However, it looks to me like this is a mis-application of the principle, as he has stated it. The background information is explicitly not indifferent to the ten possibilities – it says that three of the balls are black and seven are white. A strict use of the indifference principle will say that balls 1,2,3,5,8,9,10 are all equally likely, and balls 4,6,7 are equally likely, but there’s no obvious way to apply the indifference principle to compare possibilities from one set and possibilities from the other. To see why this is the case, consider the following example, which is identical in terms of information content, but gives rise to an intuition other than 3/10:
our cabinet is known to contain ten balls of identical size and weight, labeled {1,2,…,10}. Three balls (numbers 4, 6, 7) are in the black drawer, the other seven are in the white drawer. We are to spin the cabinet and draw one ball blindfolded. The background information consists of the statements in the last two sentences. What is the probability that we draw one from the black drawer?
Unless our information includes something about how drawers and urns and paint and the like behave physically, there is no distinguishing between these two set-ups. However, it would seem quite odd to assign probability 3/10 in the latter set-up of drawing a ball from the black drawer – a better answer (if there is a right answer) seems like 1/2. But Jaynes seems to explicitly state that there is no information about drawers and urns in the background, since he says “the background information consists of the statements in the last two sentences”. (Something like this is exactly what changes between classical and quantum statistics of particle arrangements, so this is a relevant worry if we want to apply this objective Bayesianism to physics.)
Another way to get his answer would be to first consider the set-up where we’re told there are ten balls in the urn, and told their numbers, but not told anything about their colors. Now we see that the probability of drawing one of the balls 4,6,7 is 3/10, so when we learn that these three are black and the others are white, we conclude that the probability of getting a black ball is 3/10.
But this relies on the supposition that telling us the color of the balls has no effect on our rational degree of belief that any ball is drawn. Intuitively this seems right, but that’s only because we know how color behaves in the physical world – if it had been the size or shape, this would have been less clear, and properties about location or stickiness or solidity or whatever should clearly have changed the probabilities. Without this background information explicitly included, this update can’t work.
Additionally, there’s another way to reach this set-up from a slightly smaller set of background information. If we first just say that there is an urn with some balls in it, some of which are black and some of which are white, then the indifference principle would entail that the rational degree of belief in either black or white should be 1/2. But upon learning precisely which balls are black or white, we should somehow update our probabilities in a way that changes things – but how precisely to do this is left unspecified by the indifference principle.
So Jaynes must be implicitly appealing to some extra principles here in order to get the intuitive answers, unless he thinks the problems he set up implicitly contain more information than he has stated. If so, then he won’t be able to apply this objectively in actual physical scenarios where this background information isn’t known (which is why the experiment is being performed). This is no problem for a subjective Bayesian, because she doesn’t claim that an agent has no further information, or that there is a unique probability value that every rational agent must assign in this situation. It’s also no problem for someone who takes either a frequency or chance view of probability, since in any actual physical set-up we can assume that those numbers are well-defined, even though the agent has no access to them. (This causes problems for using frequency or chance as the sole basis of statistical inference, but that’s a different worry.) The situation seems uniquely troubling for the objective Bayesian.
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