If I have two diffrerent data and compress them well among each of them I would not expect those compressions to be similar or the same. Sure time-extraction is nothing special. But there is still a step of appling the model to data it was not formed on. The scientist reverse-engineers what is going on sure, but then he acts like that solution has some relevance to what happens tomorrow, what happens to the place east of known maps, that objects that have not yet been constucted would play to their whims.
In a spatial variant, from multiple posts and crossplanks one could have the idea that there isn a fence which could be really useful in predicing and talking about posts. But then the fence can suddenly come to an end or make an unexpected 90 degree turn. How many posts do you need to see to reasonably conclude that post number #5000 exists?
Sure you could have a scenario where you try to compress previous life experience and when new experience comes in use the old solution as the first guess in compressing the extended whole. Conservation of expected evidence would say that you can’t ever really discredit the possibility of having to genuinely recompress. But it seems atleast the psychological attitude of a guess that has stood for long time would stand for a lot more is easy to fall into. I guess the people that test the theories on weird marginal conditions can appriciate that even if formulation doesn’t change the activity changes the reliability of it far more than just more and more of the same kind of stresses. Representation quality would then be connected to the cultural legacy direction, having the same representation passed down two different paths carries different information content.
For example it wouldn’t be that implausible that if an organism changed its beliefs and interpretations more when it was lowly fed and less when it was well fed after a long grind the representations would be pretty satiating. They wouldn’t prove or justify being satiated just infact cause satiation. It just happens that the property for less surprised is epistemologically interesting.
If I have two diffrerent data and compress them well among each of them I would not expect those compressions to be similar or the same.
If I drop two staplers, I can give the same compressed description of the data from their two trajectories: “uniform downward acceleration at close to 9.8 meters per second squared”.
But then the fence can suddenly come to an end or make an unexpected 90 degree turn. How many posts do you need to see to reasonably conclude that post number #5000 exists?
If I found the blueprint for the fence lying around, I’d assign a high probability that the number of fenceposts is what’s shown in the blueprint, minus any that might be knocked over or stolen. Otherwise, I’d start with my priori knowledge of the distribution of sizes of fences, and update according to any observations I make about which reference class of fence this is, and yes, how many posts I’ve encountered so far.
It seems like you haven’t gotten on board with science being a reverse-engineering process that outputs predictive models. But I don’t think this is a controversial point here on LW. Maybe it would help to clarify that a “predictive model” outputs probability distributions over outcomes, not predictions of single forced outcomes?
And if I release two balloons they will have “uniform upward acceleration at close to 9.8 meters per second squared until terminal velocity”. For proper law like things you expect them to hold with no or minimal revision. That it is a compression makes application to new cases complicated. How do you compress something you don’t have access to?
How do you know that a given blue piece of paper is a blueprint for a given fence?
The degree of reasonableness comes from stuff like 5001 post fence and a 4999 post fence being both possible. If induction was rock solid then you would very fast or immidietly believe in an infinite length fence. But induction is unreliable and points in a different direction than just checking whether each post is there. Yet we often find ourself ina situation where we have made some generalization checked, them some but not exhaustively and would like to call our epistemic state as “knowing” the fact.
If I have two diffrerent data and compress them well among each of them I would not expect those compressions to be similar or the same. Sure time-extraction is nothing special. But there is still a step of appling the model to data it was not formed on. The scientist reverse-engineers what is going on sure, but then he acts like that solution has some relevance to what happens tomorrow, what happens to the place east of known maps, that objects that have not yet been constucted would play to their whims.
In a spatial variant, from multiple posts and crossplanks one could have the idea that there isn a fence which could be really useful in predicing and talking about posts. But then the fence can suddenly come to an end or make an unexpected 90 degree turn. How many posts do you need to see to reasonably conclude that post number #5000 exists?
Sure you could have a scenario where you try to compress previous life experience and when new experience comes in use the old solution as the first guess in compressing the extended whole. Conservation of expected evidence would say that you can’t ever really discredit the possibility of having to genuinely recompress. But it seems atleast the psychological attitude of a guess that has stood for long time would stand for a lot more is easy to fall into. I guess the people that test the theories on weird marginal conditions can appriciate that even if formulation doesn’t change the activity changes the reliability of it far more than just more and more of the same kind of stresses. Representation quality would then be connected to the cultural legacy direction, having the same representation passed down two different paths carries different information content.
For example it wouldn’t be that implausible that if an organism changed its beliefs and interpretations more when it was lowly fed and less when it was well fed after a long grind the representations would be pretty satiating. They wouldn’t prove or justify being satiated just infact cause satiation. It just happens that the property for less surprised is epistemologically interesting.
If I drop two staplers, I can give the same compressed description of the data from their two trajectories: “uniform downward acceleration at close to 9.8 meters per second squared”.
If I found the blueprint for the fence lying around, I’d assign a high probability that the number of fenceposts is what’s shown in the blueprint, minus any that might be knocked over or stolen. Otherwise, I’d start with my priori knowledge of the distribution of sizes of fences, and update according to any observations I make about which reference class of fence this is, and yes, how many posts I’ve encountered so far.
It seems like you haven’t gotten on board with science being a reverse-engineering process that outputs predictive models. But I don’t think this is a controversial point here on LW. Maybe it would help to clarify that a “predictive model” outputs probability distributions over outcomes, not predictions of single forced outcomes?
And if I release two balloons they will have “uniform upward acceleration at close to 9.8 meters per second squared until terminal velocity”. For proper law like things you expect them to hold with no or minimal revision. That it is a compression makes application to new cases complicated. How do you compress something you don’t have access to?
How do you know that a given blue piece of paper is a blueprint for a given fence?
The degree of reasonableness comes from stuff like 5001 post fence and a 4999 post fence being both possible. If induction was rock solid then you would very fast or immidietly believe in an infinite length fence. But induction is unreliable and points in a different direction than just checking whether each post is there. Yet we often find ourself ina situation where we have made some generalization checked, them some but not exhaustively and would like to call our epistemic state as “knowing” the fact.