Now it is far from obvious, from a logical point of view, that we are justified in inferring universal statements from singular ones, no matter how numerous; for any conclusion drawn in this way may always turn out to be false: no matter how many instances of white swans we may have observed, this does [...]
Entropy has always struck me as a somewhat puzzling concept. The definition is simple enough but raises all kinds of puzzling questions. What is with the minus sign? Why use the logarithm? Imagine for a moment that you do not know anything about logarithms, and you were trying to understand the definition above where . [...]
[My follow-up for the previous post.] My theory of knowledge acquisition is based on two assumptions: First, data alone is not sufficient to build belief-state/world associations. We already know that causal relationships cannot be derived from data alone (start with Pearl’s work if you want to go down this particular rabbit hole). We’d need certain [...]
I’ve been thinking a lot about the problem of knowing. If we believe current theories of the mind, knowledge is partially about belief states in the brain. You have them, I have them, but what are they? Let’s imagine for the moment that belief states are patterns of activation in the brain. The neurons propagate [...]
In the absence of a clear preference or plan, I often choose actions that maximize the number of remaining available options. I believe that means that I’m running some kind of regret minimization algorithm. Let me just state for the record that I consider this a terrible way to live.
We are moving to a new apartment this weekend. That combined with some rather stressful events this week have delayed part three in my series on science. I wanted to hoist the following from the comments (from commenter Dad): Scientists do more than just try to falsify theories, they also formulate new ones when they [...]
Part two in my response to this. The section of the speech on nuclear winter is the most convincing part of the argument. It is also involves a particular piece of history that I don’t know very well, so I am forced to take Michael Crichton’s retelling of the facts at face value. Even in [...]
The first part of my response to this. When did “skeptic” become a dirty word in science? When did a skeptic require quotation marks around it? I’m going to interpret this rhetorical question as an invitation to skepticism. Let’s first consider the argument against SETI. I’m going to cut through directly to the punchline. The [...]
Though my argument that the reward interpretation of a signal is always internal to an agent still holds, Ana pointed out that the existance of the signal could be either external or internal. A reasonable distinction based on the source of the signal could differentiate between external and internal reward.
According to Wikipedia: A category mistake, or category error, is a semantic or ontological error by which a property is ascribed to a thing that could not possibly have that property. I encountered an interesting (and I hope uncontroversial) example of a category error in a meeting of the UTCS reinforcement learning group today. Richard [...]