JugglingJay
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JugglingJay has not written any posts yet.
JugglingJay has not written any posts yet.
Why didn't it work?
Because either you are not updating credence (which I have no objection to), or you can't distinguish between hypotheses without assuming simplicity as an axiom (which, feel free to do so, but I already argued it doesn't need to be assumed). But I think this train of thought seems less important than the necessity of induction discussion in the other threads.
Why is that interesting to me?
It doesn't need to be. I just found it more compelling.
forming conjectures without any attempt to refute or support them is not knowledge generation.
Totally agree. So I think we may have talked past each other a bit because I was only comparing... (read more)
Why does that matter?
Because you gave an example that didn't work?
...but I cant* see how that results in a sweeping deposit of Induction.
It doesn't, but it was at least convincing to me that probabilistic reasoning is much more vague than it makes itself out to be.
I'm not defending Bayesianism in that sense, as I said.
Sounds good.
...you are not automatically on the epistemological high ground when you refuse to engage in "semantics"
Agreed, but choosing to focus on the referent rather than the sense while acknowledging the different senses is the 'high ground' as you said, and it is an explicit engaging in semantics. I'm happy to discard or adopt terms... (read more)
That is simpler than writing something that conjectures repeating patterns...
Is it simpler? Based on your description, it doesn't sound simpler. In fact, if you asked me to write a program to conjecture repeating patterns, I would probably end up writing exactly what you would describe as prediction. From what I can tell, this is a distinction without a difference.
You need more of an argument than the word "surely" .
I actually don't need an argument because you are the one claiming a distinction. My claim was an expression of my intuition given your hypothetical, which is meant to query you for said distinction.
Did you mean "induction" ?
Nope.
... (read 556 more words →)Not under probabilistic reasoning!
But induction can be performed by organisms and software too simple to form conjectures.
I'm actually not as well informed on how reasoning operates in other organisms, but if you are allowing for primitive structures that enable some kind of proto-inductive reasoning, then I have no idea why you wouldn't also allow for primitive structures that enable proto-conjecture. If there's a distinction between the two, then surely conjecture would operate on even more primitive mechanics than inductive reasoning. Automated systems are mostly doing optimization, which is sort of in a totally different camp, but I'd allow for the possibility that something like Attention in LLMs is simulating some kind of intuition. Still, that's... (read 544 more words →)
Why is that a problem? There is still a form of probabilistic inductive reasoning that works.
I'm just articulating Popper's views to the best of my ability, and he did not believe in probabilistic induction. He explains what we call 'inductive reasoning' as mere conjecture (perhaps calibrating for some psychological biases), but that's not actually reasoning (at least to Popper). The reason assuming simplicity as a fundamental criterion is a 'problem' as you said, is because you don't need to. As I mentioned, Popper can account for the desirability of simplicity without assuming it as an axiom.
That isn't telling me induction doesn't work.
That wasn't the argument against induction. It was an accounting... (read more)
Sure, but that adds the additional assumption about simplicity, and it concedes that evidence doesn't weigh more in one generalization's favor over another. Bayesianism requires this extra axiom, which ironically makes it less simple (unless you want to reason to it from Bayes' Theorem, but that ignores the fact that should be ). In contrast, simplicity is desired on a Popperian account because it makes hypotheses easier to test; clear simple predictions are usually easier to falsify.
I think Popper's point is that induction was never needed in the first place. Knowledge grows through the process I mentioned, and we don't need to assume any inductive trick that necessarily (even probabilistically) gets us to general laws. We can accept that knowledge is fundamentally trial-and-error or guess-and-check, and the phenomenon of knowledge-production loses nothing.
He has multiple objections to induction. One is that it is not deductively valid, which in fact is addressed by reframing it in probabilistic terms.
I'm not so sure it is addressed by reframing in probabilistic terms. At least for now, I'm convinced of a version of Popper's argument against probabilistic reasoning (admittedly, probably an over-simplified version), and I plan to familiarize myself with the more formal argument in the near future.
Solomonoff induction, if you could make it work, would address that issue of knowledge creation as well, since Solomonoff Inductors generate hypotheses mechanically.
That would be fine for hypothesis-generation, and perhaps that is how our minds do it when we do so... (read more)
I don't even think you need the universe/multiverse to be deterministic. Even if there are fundamentally random aspects of the universe, we would still need to consolidate those features that are similar and those whose unpredictability can be modeled by statistics, like you said. As for prediction markets, I think their efficacy may be overblown, but I would need to look into it more.
This is a bit of an old post, but I felt I might be able to add to the discussion. Keep in mind this is my own informal take on a rigorous philosophical topic, and I am by no means a professional. My bias leans towards critical rationalism (Popperianism), but I'll try to be fair.
I think you are correct in identifying induction as the fundamental tension between the two epistemologies. Bayesian epistemology (as distinct from Bayes' Theorem) utilizes Solomonoff induction, whereas Popper is highly critical of inductive and probabilistic reasoning. For Popper, induction isn't reasoning at all, if we view reasoning as a method by which we generate knowledge. I'm sometimes... (read more)
I think in each of these threads, we've started to go in circles, so if it's any consolation I'm interested in following your future posts, and if I post anything in the future I would be interested to see your critiques.