Category: Working notes
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If we assume that games have evolved for some function, that they have some practical use to play (as per Ruth Millikan on concepts in general), we can think about the ability to cast the world in a game as a special kind of skills or capability, and as for…
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Can you become better at guessing? At a first glance the answer may seem an obvious yes – some people guess badly, others better – but exactly how would you go about that? What are the subskills that make you a better guesser, and can you practice them in some…
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Here a few notes on a question that I think would be worthwhile to explore more in detail in an essay — these are just my first notes. In Narayanamurti’s and Tsao’s excellent book on how to nurture research – The genesis of technoscientific revolutions: rethinking the nature and nurture…
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Do we learn facts? Some people surely think so – they would list the key 10 facts they would want to learn about something and then memorize them, but this does not work at all for me. I think I learn best, and think best, in questions and answers (I…
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Is there a right not be predicted? In his book Against prediction, Bernard E. Harcourt contends that the widespread use of actuarial methods in criminal justice, particularly for predicting future criminal behavior, is fundamentally flawed and potentially harmful. He argues that these predictive techniques, rather than reducing crime or improving…
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All predictions are made from some model of the predicted phenomenon, and it is sometimes useful to think of that model as a set of assumptions about the world. Some assumptions will be very basic – like assumptions of continuity, uniformity and normalcy, whereas others may be more specific. One…
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Another concept that is closely related to prediction is that of surprise. If we predict X and what instead happens is sufficiently different from X we experience a specific feeling of surprise — but the outcome needs to not just be different in some small degree, but in a very…
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When we say that something is predictable we are saying that it belongs to a class of, say, events, that have certain properties that allow them to be predicted to some precision and accuracy. This implies that there is a class of events that is the opposite: unpredictable. What does…
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What is the relationship between predictions and explanations? Our first intuition may be to say that predictions are forward-looking and explanations directed towards the past, but that is not quite right. Are predictions in some sense not thinner than explanations? I can predict that something will happen without actually understanding…
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There is a story about Thales, I think, where he is essentially asked why, if he is so clever, he has no money. So Thales goes ahead and observes the world a little, finds that with the great weather they are having there is a great olive crop coming and…