Remember, kids:
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@deedo
Exactly. Although, in general using correlation to "prove" (and by extension "disprove") something is a very slippery slope at best. I always use this example when I'm explaining correlation:There is a perfect positive correlation between "being married" and "getting divorce", and even higher correlation between "being born" and "death", as you cannot have the latter without the former, and yet, neither means causality.
@Mehrad @deedo @juergen_hubert
Interestingly, the original meaning of 'prove' meant 'test'. Which is why you have sayings like 'the exception that proves the rule': it meant the exception that tested (and falsified) the rule.
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@androcat @bms @lritter @swoonie @juergen_hubert
was about to ask the same thing. Not that I disagree with the comment in a vacuum, but out of context here.
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@ljwrites @juergen_hubert (i mean, if someone says, "i can't believe it's all just random", that's a pretty clear sign of reading comprehension failure, but it's important to drill down to the specific point of that particular person's failure.)
@ljwrites @juergen_hubert also: for many topics, the "just a theory" nonsense may only be academic, but when it comes to evolution in particular, we actually have a civic responsibility to get more people to read about it, because it's impossible to understand public health issues without understanding evolution.
e.g.:
- everyone should have anticipated waves of variants of SARS-CoV-2.
- the fact that selective pressures apply to foodborne pathogens should feel obvious to everyone.
- etc
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@androcat @CynAq @lritter @swoonie @juergen_hubert I'm sure it crept into the thread somewhere, but the key point here is UNCERTAINTY. It's a lemma, a stepping stone. And I invoke the example of "what we're calling AI this week, depending on who you speak to" to illustrate the point. The GOFAI systems did handle it to some degree, the DNNs differ significantly in the technological approach used to emulating human cognitive capabilities and expression. When the "reasoning" of which one writes is actually a tie-break between an embedded token-based mapping, that surely does not resemble the weighing up of facts, at least to my mind, which leads back to the mistakes perhaps on the part of the lay person who cannot deal with uncertainty. But we do it all the time "under the hood" at a pre-conscious level. Just typing these words: uncertainty, in the neuro-chemical impulse of the fingers and their sense-feeling, not data, which can only ever be an approximation to what some might term qualia. There's something missing from the DNNs, that's obvious, but no one is putting their finger on it, hence the burden of proof arguments which arise on both "sides".
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@ljwrites @juergen_hubert also: for many topics, the "just a theory" nonsense may only be academic, but when it comes to evolution in particular, we actually have a civic responsibility to get more people to read about it, because it's impossible to understand public health issues without understanding evolution.
e.g.:
- everyone should have anticipated waves of variants of SARS-CoV-2.
- the fact that selective pressures apply to foodborne pathogens should feel obvious to everyone.
- etc
- everyone should be able to understand why researchers anticipated, many years in advance, the natural emergence of a virus like SARS-CoV-2.
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@androcat @bms @lritter @swoonie @juergen_hubert
was about to ask the same thing. Not that I disagree with the comment in a vacuum, but out of context here.
@CynAq @bms @lritter @swoonie @juergen_hubert
If going out of context is allowed: as a Humean, I don't believe Abduction is a thing.
Ultimately, Hume never named anything, and never used the word "induction".
What he did was describe an
"operation of the mind, by which we infer like effects from like causes, and vice versa, is so essential to the subsistence of all human creatures, it is not probable, that it could be trusted to the fallacious deductions of our reason, which is slow in its operations; appears not, in any degree, during the first years of infancy; and at best is, in every age and period of human life, extremely liable to error and mistake. It is more conformable to the ordinary wisdom of nature to secure so necessary an act of the mind, by some instinct or mechanical tendency, which may be infallible in its operations, may discover itself at the first appearance of life and thought, and may be independent of all the laboured deductions of the understanding. "
With that "and vice versa", there is no need for Abduction - it's all just "induction", but running either normally or in reverse.
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@lritter @MadCowKastor @swoonie @juergen_hubert "Clankers" understand nothing. They are not capable of engaging in dialectic and are algorithmic constructs which enumerate a Hilbert-space-like embedding via a net-of-neural-nets.
If straw man detection were a thing, that would be a killer app. But for the unreliable imitative narrators, which statistically approximate the outputs at the mercy of the system prompts and RLHF, reason is not possible.
@bms @MadCowKastor @swoonie @juergen_hubert don't get too hung up on my use of the word "understanding". i also say compilers understand well-formed programs. there is nothing more to it.
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- everyone should be able to understand why researchers anticipated, many years in advance, the natural emergence of a virus like SARS-CoV-2.
- everyone should have understood why a higher rate of transmission would cause a higher rate of emergence of new variants, and why keeping the rate of transmission down would have sustained the effectiveness of each version of the vaccine for a longer period of time.
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You can't fuck around with the Laws of Gravity.
You absolutely can, Einstein did and this is why no one has the hubris of Newton when it comes to naming their theories anymore.
@david_chisnall @tribactam @juergen_hubert
Laws exist ... in math. One postulates/sets up a particular universe, ... with laws in it. True and false exist there. All is clean and simple there, in that mathematical world of different universes.
Another reminder why they call it Mathematical Art's department in contrast to Physics Science department
Spell meth with 'a' to get real high 🫣
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@t_robinart @juergen_hubert Yeah that's what I was referring to.
@ljwrites @juergen_hubert
Oh! *whoosh* that went straight over my head.
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