Choosing Among Interpretations of Probability
  There is available an ever-increasing variety of procedures for managing
uncertainty. These methods are discussed in the literature of artificial
intelligence, as well as in the literature of philosophy of science. Heretofore
these methods have been evaluated by intuition, discussion, and the general
philosophical method of argument and counterexample. Almost any method of
uncertainty management will have the property that in the long run it will
deliver numbers approaching the relative frequency of the kinds of events at
issue. To find a measure that will provide a meaningful evaluation of these
treatments of uncertainty, we must look, not at the long run, but at the short
or intermediate run. Our project attempts to develop such a measure in terms of
short or intermediate length performance. We represent the effects of practical
choices by the outcomes of bets offered to agents characterized by two
uncertainty management approaches: the subjective Bayesian approach and the
Classical confidence interval approach. Experimental evaluation suggests that
the confidence interval approach can outperform the subjective approach in the
relatively short run.
