AlanCrowe

• AlanCroweFeb 6, 2014, 8:47 PM

  64 points

  on: True num­bers and fake numbers

  I think there is a tale to tell about the consumer surplus and it goes like this.

  Alice loves widgets. She would pay $100 for a widget. She goes on line and finds Bob offering widgets for sale for $100. Err, that is not really what she had in mind. She imagined paying $30 for a widget, and feeling $70 better off as a consequence. She emails Bob: How about $90?

  Bob feels like giving up altogether. It takes him ten hours to hand craft a widget and the minimum wage where he lives is $10 an hour. He was offering widgets for $150. $100 is the absolute minimum. Bob replies: No.

  While Alice is deciding whether to pay $100 for a widget that is only worth $100 to her, Carol puts the finishing touches to her widget making machine. At the press of a button Carol can produce a widget for only $10. She activates her website, offering widgets for $40. Alice orders one at once.

  How would Eve the economist like to analyse this? She would like to identify a consumer surplus of 100 − 40 = 60 dollars, and a producer surplus of 40 − 10 = 30 dollars, for a total gain from trade of 60 + 30 = 90 dollars. But before she can do this she has to telephone Alice and Carol and find out the secret numbers, $100 and $10. Only the market price of $40 is overt.

  Alice thinks Eve is spying for Carol. If Carol learns that Alice is willing to pay $100, she will up the price to $80. So Alice bullshits Eve: Yeh, I’m regretting my purchase, I’ve rushed to buy a widget, but what’s it worth really? $35. I’ve over paid.

  Carol thinks Eve is spying for Alice. If Alice learns that they only cost $10 to make, then she will bargain Carol down to $20. Carol bullshits Eve: Currently they cost me $45 to make, but if I can grow volumes I’ll get a bulk discount on raw materials and I hope to be making them for $35 and be in profit by 2016.

  Eve realises that she isn’t going to be able to get the numbers she needs, so she values the trade at its market price and declares GDP to be $40. It is what economist do. It is the desperate expedient to which the opacity of business has reduced them.

  Now for the twist in the tale. Carol presses the button on her widget making machine, which catches fire and is destroyed. Carol gives up widget making. Alice buys from Bob for $100. Neither is happy with the deal; the total of consumer surplus and producer surplus is zero. Alice is thinking that she would have been happier spending her $100 eating out. Bob is thinking that he would have had a nicer time earning his $100 waiting tables for 10 hours.

  Eve revises her GDP estimate. She has committed herself to market prices, so it is up 150% at $100. Err, that is not what is supposed to happen. Vital machinery is lost in a fire, prices soar and goods are produced by tedious manual labour, the economy has gone to shit, producing no surplus instead of producing a $90 surplus. But Eve’s figures make this look good.

  I agree that there is a problem with the consumer surplus. It is too hard to discover. But the market price is actually irrelevant. Going with the number you can get, even though it doesn’t relate to what you want to know is another kind of fake, in some ways worse.

  Disclaimer: I’m not an economist. Corrections welcomed.

• AlanCroweNov 19, 2013, 4:46 PM

  5 points

  in reply to: Anatoly_Vorobey’s comment on: Hap­piness and Pro­duc­tivity. Liv­ing Alone. Liv­ing with Friends. Liv­ing with Fam­ily.

  I read your link. Here is what I got from it.

  There are three ways to write a novel.

  1)Hemingway/​Melville: Do stuff, write about it.

  2)Kaleidoscope: Study literature at university. Read more novels. Go to writers’ workshops. Read yet more novels. Write a million words of juvenilia. Read even more novels. Create mash-up master piece.

  3)Irish: Sit in public house, drinking. Write great Irish Novel. How? Miraculously!

  Beckett propagandizes against the Irish way, saying “My character, Krapp, tried the Irish way. He tried to helped the miracle along with lots of self-obsession. It worked out badly for him; it will work out badly for you.”

• AlanCroweNov 18, 2013, 11:59 AM

  4 points

  in reply to: VAuroch’s comment on: Bell’s The­o­rem: No EPR “Real­ity”

  That helps me. In his book Quantum Reality, Nick Herbert phrases it this way:

  The Everett multiverse violates the CFD assumption because although such a world has plenty of contrafactuality, it is short on definiteness.

  which is cutely aphoristic, but confused me. What does contrafactuality even mean in MWI?

  Pointing out that MWI rejects factual definiteness clears things up nicely.

• AlanCroweNov 16, 2013, 8:26 PM

  7 points

  in reply to: Baughn’s comment on: The Restora­tion of William: the skele­ton of a short story about re­s­ur­rec­tion and identity

  My health is very poor. A fleshed out version might run to 25 000 words. I’m not going to manage that. Worse than that, I don’t really know how to write. They say one needs to write a million words to be any good, so the full project, learn to write, then come back and flesh it out, runs to 1 025 000 words.

  Please have a go at fleshing it out yourself.

  Even if you never publish it, you will have to commit to views about personal identity and how and well it survives the passage of decades. Perhaps, in thirty years time, you will rediscover your completed manuscript. You would get to look back at yourself looking forward and both compare who you are with who you thought you would become and compare the person you remembered with the author of the text. Have fun keeping track of how many of you there are.

• AlanCroweNov 16, 2013, 11:38 AM

  15 points

  in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: The Restora­tion of William: the skele­ton of a short story about re­s­ur­rec­tion and identity

  The actions of the main participants are consistent with their incentives. The owners of the archiving company dodge scandal and ruin by covering up the fact that they have lost Bill’s tape “That was unthinkable.”. The employees of the archiving company play along with doctoring Fred-minus30′s tape “with a bit of manual fixing of uncorrectable errors.” and get to keep their jobs.

  Fred-minus30 faces the harsh reality of the law that says “There can be only one.” He has read his share of hologram-horror and hologram-thriller. He can blow the whistle on the cover-up and say “actually I’m not Bill, I’m a duplicate of some-one living.” Whoops! That makes him the soon-to-be-euthanised of a hologram-horror. Or maybe he can try being the escaped hologram of a hologram-thriller by slipping away and murdering Current-Fred and replacing him. But Fred-minus30 is 30 years behind. That will totally not work. So Fred-minus30 faces strong incentives to play along and do his best job of impersonating long forgotten Bill.

  mysteriously nobody notices

  In the story people notice. They notice and do some serious digging. But what are their incentives? What are they digging for? Once they have dug up interesting stuff from their personal histories that they can chat about with their friends, they stop digging.

The Restora­tion of William: the skele­ton of a short story about re­s­ur­rec­tion and identity

• AlanCroweNov 15, 2013, 5:45 PM

  7 points

  in reply to: DataPacRat’s comment on: I no­tice that I am con­fused about Iden­tity and Resurrection

  I think that is the right question and plunge ahead giving a specific answer, basically that “the self” is an instinct, not a thing.

  The self is the verbal behaviour that results from certain instincts necessary to the functioning of a cognitive architecture with intelligence layered on top of a short term reward system. We can notice how slightly different instincts give rise to slightly different senses of self and we can ask engineers’ questions about which instincts, and hence which sense-of-self, give the better functioning cognitive architecture. But these are questions of better or worse, not true or false.

  But I express myself too tersely. I long for spell of good health, so that I can expand the point to an easy-read length.

• AlanCroweOct 23, 2013, 6:58 PM

  6 points

  on: What Can We Learn About Hu­man Psy­chol­ogy from Chris­tian Apolo­get­ics?

  Each compartment has its own threshold for evidence.

  The post reminded me of Christians talking bravely about there being plenty of evidence for their beliefs. How does that work?

  • When evidence is abundant we avoid information overload by raising the threshold for what counts as evidence. We have the luxury of taking our decisions on the basis of good quality evidence and the further luxury of dismissing mediocre evidence as not evidence at all.

  • Evidence is seldom abundant. Usually we work with a middling threshold for evidence, doing the best we can with the mediocre evidence that the middle threshold admits to our councils, and accepting that we will sometimes do the wrong thing due to misleading evidence.

  • When evidence is scarce we turn our quality threshold down another notch, so we still have evidence, even if it is just a translation of a copy of an old text that is supposed to be eye witness testimony but was written down one hundred years after the event.

  I think that the way it works with compartmentalization is that we give each compartment its own threshold. For example, an accountant is doing due diligence work on the prospect for The Plastic Toy Manufacturing Company. It looks like being a good investment, they have an exclusive contract with Disney for movie tie-ins. Look, it says so, right there in the prospectus. Naturally the accountant writes to Disney to confirm this. If Disney do not reply, that is a huge red flag.

  On Sunday the accountant goes to Church. They have a prospectus, called the Bible, which makes big claims about their exclusive deal with God. When you pray to God to get confirmation, He ignores you. Awkward!

  People have a sense of what it is realistic to expect by way of evidence which varies between the various compartments of their lives. In every compartment their beliefs are comfortably supported by a reasonable quantity and quality of evidence relative to the standard expected for that compartment.

  Should we aim at a uniform threshold for evidence across all compartments? That ideas seems too glib. It is good to be more open and trusting in friendship and personal relationships than in business. One will not get far in artistic creation if one doubts ones own talent to the extent of treating it like a dodgy business partner.

  Or maybe having a uniform threshold is exactly the right thing to do. That leaves you aware that in important areas of your life you have little evidence and your posteriori distributions have lots of entropy. Then you have to live courageously, trusting friends and lovers despite poor evidence and the risk of betrayal, trusting ones talent and finishing ones novel despite the risk that it is 1000 pages of unpublishable drek.

• AlanCroweOct 4, 2013, 8:06 PM

  7 points

  on: The best 15 words

  As Eilenberg-Mac Lane first observed, “category” has been defined in order to be able to define “functor” and “functor” has been defined in order to be able to define “natural transformation”.

  Saunders Mac Lane, Categories for the Working Mathematician

• AlanCroweOct 4, 2013, 7:58 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: The best 15 words

  That doesn’t seem to be strictly true.

  It goes against the spirit of “15 words” to insist on strict truth. The merit of the quote lies in the fourth clause.

  or they have a common effect you’re conditioning on.

  That’s the big surprise. The point of boiling it down to “15 words” is to pick which subtlety makes it into the shortest formulation.

• AlanCroweSep 28, 2013, 11:31 PM

  7 points

  in reply to: fubarobfusco’s comment on: Mak­ing Fun of Things is Easy

  In Beyond Freedom and Dignity Skinner writes (page 21)

  A more important reason is that the inner man seems at times to be directly observed. We must infer the jubilance of a falling body, but can we not feel our own jubilance? We do, indeed, feel things inside our own skin, but we do not feel the things which have been invented to explain behaviour. The possessed man does not feel the possessing demon and may even deny that one exists. The juvenile delinquent does not feel his disturbed personality. The intelligent man does not feel his intelligence or the introvert his introversion. (In fact, these dimensions of mind or character are said to be observable only through complex statistical procedures.) The speaker does not feel the grammatical rules he is said to apply in composing sentences, and men spoke grammatically for thousands of years before anyone knew there were rules. The respondent to a questionnaire does not feel the attitudes or opinions which lead him to check items in particular ways. We do feel certain states of our bodies associated with behaviour, but as Freud pointed out we behave in the same way when we do not feel them; they are by-products and not to be mistaken for causes.

  Dennett writes (page 83)

  The heterophenomenologlcal method neither challenges nor accepts as entirely true the assertions of subjects, but rather maintains a constructive and sympathetic neutrality, in the hopes of compiling a definitive description of the world according to the subjects.

  So far Skinner and Dennett are not disagreeing. Skinner did say “We do, indeed, feel things inside our own skin,...”. He can hardly object to Dennett writing down our descriptions of what we feel, as verbal behaviour to be explained in the future with a reductionist explanation.

  Dennett continues on page 85

  My suggest, then, is that if we were to find real goings-on in people’s brains that had enough of the “defining” properties of the items that populate their heterophenomenological worlds, we could reasonably propose that we had discovered what they were really talking about—even if they initially resisted the identifications. And if we discovered that the real goings-on bore only a minor resemblance to the heterophenomenological items, we could reasonably declare that people were just mistaken in the beliefs they expressed.

  Dennett takes great pains to be clear. I feel confident that I understand what he is taking 500 pages to say. Skinner writes more briefly, 200 pages, and leaves room for interpretation. He says that we do not feel the things that have been invented to explain behaviour and he dismisses them.

  I think it is unambiguous that he is expelling the explanatory mental states of the psychology of his day (such as introversion) from the heterophenomenological world of his subjects, on the grounds that they are not things that we feel or talk about feeling. But he is not, in Dennett’s phrase “feigning anesthesia” (page 40). Skinner is making a distinction, yes we may feel jubilant, no we do not feel a disturbed personality.

  What is not so clear is the scope of Skinner’s dismissal of say introversion. Dennett raises the possibility of discovering meaningful mental states that actually exist. One interpretation of Skinner is that he denies this possibility as a matter of principle. My interpretation of Skinner is that he is picking a different quarrel. His complaint is that psychologists claim to have discovered meaningful mental states already, but haven’t actually reached the starting gate; they haven’t studied enough behaviour to even try to infer the mental states that lie behind behaviour. He rejects explanatory concepts such as attitudes because he thinks that the work needed to justify the existence of such explanatory concepts hasn’t been done.

  I think that the controversy arises from the vehemence with which Skinner rejects mental states. He dismisses them out-of-hand. One interpretation is that Skinner rejects them so completely because he thinks the work cannot be done; it is basically a rejection in principle. My interpretation is that Skinner rejects them so completely because he has his own road map for research in psychology.

  First pay lots of attention to behaviour. And then lots more attention to behaviour, because it has been badly neglected. Find some empirical laws. For example, One can measure extinction times: how long does the rat continue pressing the lever after the rewards have stopped. One can play with reward schedules. One pellet every time versus a 50:50 chance of two pellets. One discovers that extinction times are long with uncertain rewards. One could play for decades exploring this stuff and end up with quantitative “laws” for the explanatory concepts to explain. Which is when serious work, inferring the existence of explanatory concepts can begin.

  I see Skinner vehemently rejecting the explanatory concepts of the psychology of his day because he thinks that the necessary work hasn’t even begun, and cannot yet be started because the foundations are not in place. Consequently he doesn’t feel the need to spend any time considering whether it has been brought to a successful conclusion (which he doesn’t expect to see in his life-time).

• AlanCroweSep 28, 2013, 7:38 PM

  3 points

  on: Mak­ing Fun of Things is Easy

  This example pushed me into formulating Crowe’s Law of Sarcastic Dismissal: Any explanation that is subtle enough to be correct is turbid enough to make its sarcastic dismissal genuinely funny.

  Skinner had a subtle point to make, that the important objection to mentalism is of a very different sort. The world of the mind steals the show. Behaviour is not recognized as a subject in its own right.

  I think I grasped Skinner’s point after reading something Feynman wrote on explanations in science. You can explain why green paint is green by explaining that paint consists of a binder (oil for an oil paint) and a pigment. Green paint is green because the pigment is green. But why is the pigment green? Eventually the concept of green must ground in something non-green, wavelengths of light, properties of molecules.

  It is similar with people. One sophisticated way of having an inner man without an infinite regress is exhibited by Minsky’s Society of Mind. One can explain the outer man in terms of a committee of inner men provided that the inner men, sitting on the committee, are simpler than the outer man they purport to explain. And the inner men can be explained in terms of interior-inner-men, who are simpler still and whom we explain in terms of component-interior-inner-men,… We had better have remember that 1+1/​2+1/​3+1/​4+1/​5+1/​6+… diverges. It is not quite enough that the inner men be simpler. They have to get simpler fast enough. Then our explanatory framework is philosophically admissible.

  But notice the anachronism that I am committing. Skinner retired in 1974. Society of Mind was published in 1988. Worse yet, the perspective of Society of Mind comes from functional programming, where tree structured data is processed by recursive functions. Does your recursive function terminate? Programmers learn that an infinite regress is avoided if all the recursive calls are on sub-structures of the original structure, smaller by a measure which makes the structures well-founded. In the 1930′s and 1940′s Skinner was trying to rescue psychology from the infinite regress of man explained by an inner man, himself a man. It is not reasonable to ask him to anticipate Minsky by 50 years.

  Skinner is trying to wake psychology from its complacent slumber. The inner man explains the outer man. The explanation does indeed account for the outer man. The flaw is that inner man is no easier to explain than the outer man.

  We could instead look at behaviour. The outer man has behaved before. What happened last time? If the outer man does something unexpected we could look back. If the usual behaviour worked out badly the time before, that offers an explanation of sorts for the change. There is much to be done. For example, if some behaviour works ten times in a row, how many more times will it be repeated after it has stopped working? We already know that the inner man is complicated and hence under-determined by our experimental observations. This argues for caution and delay in admitting him to our explanations. We cannot hope to deduce his character until we have observed a great deal of his behaviour.

  But let us return to humour and the tragedy of Sidney Morgenbesser’s sarcastic dismissal

  Let me see if I understand your thesis. You think we shouldn’t anthropomorphize people?

  The tragedy lies in the acuteness of Morgenbesser’s insight. He grasped Skinner’s subtle point. Skinner argues that anthropomorphizing people is a trap; do that an your are stuck with folk psychology and have no way to move beyond it. But Morgenbesser makes a joke out of it.

  I accept that the joke is genuinely funny. It is surely a mistake for biologists to anthropomorphize cats and dogs and other animals, precisely because they are not people. So there is a template to fill in. “It is surely a mistake for psychologists to anthropomorphize men and women and other humans, precisely because they are not people.” Hilarity ensues.

  Morgenbesser understands, makes a joke, and loses his understanding somewhere in the laughter. The joke is funny and sucks every-one into the loss of understanding.

• AlanCroweSep 4, 2013, 4:13 PM

  7 points

  in reply to: bokov’s comment on: Sup­pos­ing you in­her­ited an AI pro­ject...

  Readers don’t know what your post is about. Your comment explains “My goal …” but that should be the start of the post, orienting the reader.

  How does your hypothetical help identify possible dangling units? You’ve worked it out in your head. That should be the second part of post, working through the logic, here is my goal, here is the obstacle, here is how I get round it.

• AlanCroweSep 2, 2013, 11:57 AM

  11 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes Septem­ber 2013

  For the most part the objects which approve themselves to us are not so much the award of well-deserved certificates—which is supposed by the mass of unthinking people to be the main object—but to give people something definite to work for; to counteract the tendency to sipping and sampling which so often defeats the aspirations of gifted beings,...

  --- Sir Hubert Parry, speaking to The Royal College of Music about the purpose of music examinations

  Initially I thought this a wonderful quote because, looking back at my life, I could see several defeats (not all in music) attributable to sipping and sampling. But Sir Hubert is speaking specifically about music. The context tells you Sir Hubert’s proposed counter to sipping and sampling: individual tuition aiming towards an examination in the form a viva.

  The general message is “counter the tendency to sipping and sampling by finding something definite to work for, analogous to working ones way up the Royal College of Music grade system”. But working out the analogy is left as an exercise for the reader, so the general message, if Sir Hubert intended it at all, is rather feeble.

• AlanCroweAug 29, 2013, 6:46 PM

  2 points

  on: Open thread, Au­gust 26 - Septem­ber 1, 2013

  Any examples of total recursive functions that are not primitive recursive and do not violently explode?

  The set of primitive recursive functions is interesting because it is pretty inclusive, (lots of functions have a primitive recursive implementation) and primitive recursive functions always terminate. I’m interested in trying to implement general purpose machine learning by enumerating primitive recursive functions. Which raises the question of just how general the primitive recursive functions really are.

  Ackermann’s function gives an example of what you miss out when you confine yourself to primitive recursive functions. But Ackermann’s function explodes violently. The values of the function rapidly become too large for any practical use. If that were typical, I would think that I miss out on nothing of practical importance when I restrict myself to primitive recursive functions.

  But I suspect that the violent explosion is only there to meet the needs of the proof. Given a function that is specified by an implementation that is not primitive recursive, how can you tell whether it is primitive recursive? There might be a clever primitive recursive way of implementing the function that is hard to find. One needs to come up with a proof, and that is also hard to find. The violent explosion of Ackermann’s function lets one construction a proof; no primitive recursive function goes BOOM! quite as dramatically.

  Are there any other proof techniques and hence other, more practically important, functions that are (known to be) total recursive but not primitive recursive?

• AlanCroweAug 23, 2013, 2:04 PM

  1 point

  on: Are ‘Ev­i­dence-based’ poli­cies dam­ag­ing poli­cy­mak­ing?

  It is an important topic, but the Institute of Economic Affairs landing page that you link to is pretty lame.

  Emphasizing “Evidence” gives one a hefty shove towards evidence that is quick and easy to gather.

  QUICK The IEA say

  A disregard for substitution effects.

  but the actual problem is that substitution takes time. If you want to gather evidence about substitution effects you have to be patient. “Evidence based policy making” is biased towards fast-evidence, to accommodate the urgency of policy making. So of course substitution effects get under-estimated.

  EASY Computing correlations is easy, tracing causality is hard. Worse, you can hardly hope to unravel the network of causal connections in a real world problem without making some theoretical commitments. An emphasis on “Evidence” leaves you relying on the hope that correlation does imply causality because you can get evidence for correlations. Causality? Not very practical. Then you get kicked in the teeth by Goodhart’s Law

  The IEA say

  Calculating the external costs of harmful activities.

  which is true, but hardly the worst of the problems. Ideally one would estimate the benefits of an economic policy based on adding the consumer surplus and the producer surplus. But this is too hard. Instead one tots up the market prices of things. This leads to GDP, which is a notoriously crap measure of welfare. But if you insist on “evidence” you are going to end up throwing out theoretical considerations of consumer and producer surplus in favor of GDP.

  This submission is getting down voted. You might what to blog about the topic and try again with a link to your blog post. It shouldn’t be too hard to provide a substantial improvement on the IEA landing page.

• AlanCroweJul 4, 2013, 7:24 PM

  3 points

  in reply to: JonahS’s comment on: Progress on au­to­mated math­e­mat­i­cal the­o­rem prov­ing?

  Do you have evidence in the other direction?

  No. I think one typically has to come up with a brutally truncated approximation to actually Bayesian reasoning. For example, if you have n propositions, instead of considering all 2^ n basic conjunctions, ones first idea is to assume that they are all independent. Typically that is a total failure; the independence assumption abolishes the very interactions that were of interest. So one might let proposition n depend on proposition n-1 and reinvent Markov models.

  I don’t see much hope of being able to anticipate which, if any, crude approximations to Bayesian reason are going to work well enough. One just has to try it and see. I don’t think that my comment goes any deeper than saying that there are lots of close to practical things due to be tried soon, so I expect one or two pleasant surprises.

• AlanCroweJul 4, 2013, 7:07 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: alex_zag_al’s comment on: Progress on au­to­mated math­e­mat­i­cal the­o­rem prov­ing?

  You’ve put your finger on a weakness of my optimistic vision. If the guesses are calling it 90% of the time, they significantly extend the feasible depth of search. But 60:40? Meh! There is a lot of room for the insights to fail to be sharp enough, which turns the Bayesian stuff into CPU-cycle wasting overhead.

• AlanCroweJul 3, 2013, 9:21 PM

  13 points

  on: Progress on au­to­mated math­e­mat­i­cal the­o­rem prov­ing?

  Current theorem provers don’t have a “sense of direction”.

  From the description of Polya’s Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning: Vol. II: Patterns of Plausible Inference:

  This is a guide to the practical art of plausible reasoning, particularly in mathematics but also in every field of human activity. Using mathematics as the example par excellence, Professor Polya shows how even that most rigorous deductive discipline is heavily dependent on techniques of guessing, inductive reasoning, and reasoning by analogy. In solving a problem, the answer must be guessed at before a proof can even begin, and guesses are usually made from a knowledge of facts, experience, and hunches. The truly creative mathematician must be a good guesser first and a good prover afterward; many important theorems have been guessed but not proved until much later. In the same way, solutions to problems can be guessed, and a good guesser is much more likely to find a correct solution...

  Current theorem provers search for a proof, and even contain some ad hoc heuristics for exploring their search trees. (For example, Paulson’s book ML for the working programmer ends with a chapter on theorem proving and offers “We have a general heuristic: never apply universal:left or existential:right to a goal if a different rule can usefully be applied.) However, Polya’s notion of being a good guesser has been formalised as Bayesian reasoning. If a theorem prover, facing a fork in its search tree, uses Bayes Theorem to pick the most likely branch first, it may find much deeper results.

  I don’t think there is currently much overlap between those working on theorem proving and those working on Bayesian statistics. There is perhaps even a clash of temperaments between those who seek absolute certainty and those who seek an edge in the messy process of muddling through. Nevertheless I foresee great possibilities of using Bayesian reasoning to guide the internal search of theorem provers, thus giving them a sense of direction.

  Reasoning “X hasn’t been progressing recently, therefore X is unlikely to progress in the near future.” is good reasoning if that is really all that we know. But it is also weak reasoning which we should be quick to discard if we see a relevant change looming. The next ten or twenty years might see the incorporation of Bayesian reasoning as a guiding principle for tree search heuristics inside theorem provers and lead to large advances.

  What links here?

  • Ap­pli­ca­tions of log­i­cal uncertainty by alex_zag_al (Oct 18, 2014, 7:26 PM; 30 points)

• AlanCroweJul 3, 2013, 3:46 PM

  16 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes July 2013

  Madmen we are, but not quite on the pattern of those who are shut up in a madhouse. It does not concern any of them to discover what sort of madness afflicts his neighbor, or the previous occupants of his cell; but it matters very much to us. The human mind is less prone to go astray when it gets to know to what extent, and in how many directions, it is itself liable to err, and we can never devote too much time to the study of our aberrations.

  Bernard de Fontenelle,1686

  Found in book review