<div dir="ltr">Following up Daston's paper on the origins of objective and subjective probability, one of the files that ended up in my Downloads folder was <a href="http://www.fitelson.org/probability/ramsey.pdf">http://www.fitelson.org/probability/ramsey.pdf</a>, a collection of three essays by Frank P. Ramsey on probability. HackerNews came up with a link to Cheryl Misak's biography of Frank Ramsey this morning, <a href="https://hnn.us/article/174250">https://hnn.us/article/174250</a>.<div></div><br><div>Ramsey's first essay commences with these epigrams:<div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that
it is and of what is not that it is not is true.</blockquote><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
-- Aristotle.
</blockquote><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">When several hypotheses are presented to our mind which we believe to be mutually
exclusive and exhaustive, but about which we know nothing further, we distribute our belief
equally among them .... This being admitted as an account of the way in which we actually
do distribute our belief in simple cases, the whole of the subsequent theory follows as a
deduction of the way in which we must distribute it in complex cases if we would be
consistent. </blockquote><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">-- W. F. Donkits.
</blockquote><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">The object of reasoning is to find out, from the consideration of what we already know,
something else which we do not know. Consequently, reasoning is good if it be such as to
give a true conclusion from true premises, and not otherwise.
</blockquote><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">-- C. S. Peirce.
</blockquote><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believed.
</blockquote><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">-- W. Blake. </blockquote><div><br></div></div><div>The epigram by W. F. Donkits in this paper is apparently the only place his name appears on the internet.</div><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">What follows to the end of the section is almost entirely based on the writings of C. S. Peirce. [Especially his<br>"Illustrations of the Logic of Science", Popular Science Monthly, 1877 and 1878, reprinted in Chance Love and Logic<br>(1923).]</blockquote><div><br></div><div>Back to Popular Science again!</div><div><br></div><div>-- rec -- </div></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sun, Dec 29, 2019 at 11:43 AM Roger Critchlow <<a href="mailto:rec@elf.org">rec@elf.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr">I thought she was arguing that very mechanisms that google, facebook, twitter, etc. are using right now to engage people's interest online are already engendering and entrenching all sorts of weird beliefs. 6-9 minutes of activated charcoal advocacy videos and you're probably certain that black smoothies are okay, maybe even good for you. There are no neutral platforms, because the order in which content is presented is never neutral, and it is especially biased if its goal is to keep you clicking. Whether this allows focused election manipulation seems dubious, but it does allow for thousands of bizarre theories to be injected into the public consciousness at low cost, and some of them even make money. Hey, some of them, bizarre as they are, might turn out to be correct, not that the platforms have any interest in that aspect, because that wouldn't be neutral.<div><br></div><div>Andrew Gelman linked this paper, <a href="https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/81961261.pdf" target="_blank">https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/81961261.pdf</a>, earlier this week, too. It's about the genesis of the distinction(s) between objective and subjective probabilities in the 19th century. Several writers started distinguishing objective and subjective probabilities writing in German, French, and English at about the same time. True to Kidd's scatterplots of concept variability, none of them appear to be making the same distinction even when they claim to be agreeing. Part of the problem may have been that objective and subjective had just barely adopted the meanings which we more or less use to this day. Prior to this time:</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">The objective in this context referred
to the objects of thought, and the subjective to objects in themselves [35, A.2.a].
This (to modern ears) inverted sense survived well into the 18th century; witness,
for example, the entry for "Objective/objectivus" in the 1728 edition of Chamber's
Dictionary: "Hence a thing is said to exist OBJECTIVELY, objectivè, when it
exists no otherwise than in being known; or in being an Object of the Mind" [6,
649]. The meanings of the terms had, however, already branched and crisscrossed
in the 17th century in both Latin and in various vernaculars, although "objective"
still generally modified thoughts rather than external objects. A famous example
can be found in the Meditationes (1641) of René Descartes, in which he contrasted
the "objective reality" of an idea--whether it represents its cause by perfection
and/or content--with its "formal reality"--whether it corresponds to anything
external to the mind [15, 40-42; 8, 136-137; 33]</blockquote><div>Over the 18th century we -- or at least some of us -- swapped Platonic objects for Empirical objects. The dictionaries attribute the change to Kant, but the author notes that the new concept was sort of a Cartesian-Kantian-wild-type hybrid, not exactly anything that anyone had exactly proposed.</div><div><br></div><div>-- rec --</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sat, Dec 28, 2019 at 10:23 AM Steven A Smith <<a href="mailto:sasmyth@swcp.com" target="_blank">sasmyth@swcp.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
<div>
<p>REC -</p>
<p>Good find! <br>
</p>
<p>I am not closely following the development and results of GAN
work, but it seems like this kind of study explicates at least ONE
GOOD REASON for worrying about AI changing the nature of the world
as we know it (even if it isn't a precise existential threat).
Convolved with Carl's offering around "weaponizing complexity", it
feels more and more believable (recursion unintended) that the
wielders of strong AI/ML will have the upper hand in any tactical
and possibly strategic domain (warfare, public opinion, markets,
etc.). <br>
</p>
<p>I don't know how deeply technical the presumed
election-manipulation of 2016 (now 2020) is, but it *does* seem
like the work you reference here implies that with the information
venues/vectors like streaming video (TV, Movies, Clips, attendant
advertising) and social media (FB/Insta/Twit...) the understanding
and tools are already in place to significantly manipulate public
opinion. Based on my anecdotal experience about people's
*certainty*, this article is very on-point. And this doesn't
even reference the technology of "deep fakes". </p>
<p>- Steve<br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<div>On 12/27/19 8:21 PM, Roger Critchlow
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">This talk was mentioned on hacker news this week
and inspired my babbling at Saveur this morning. <a href="https://slideslive.com/38921495/how-to-know" target="_blank">https://slideslive.com/38921495/how-to-know</a>.
The talk was delivered at Neural IPS on December 9 and discusses
recent research on how people come to believe they know
something.
<div><br>
</div>
<div>This paper <a href="https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.1162/opmi_a_00017" target="_blank">https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.1162/opmi_a_00017</a> describes
the Amazon Mechanical Turk experiment on people becoming
certain they understood the boolean rule they were being
taught by examples.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>-- rec --</div>
<div><br>
</div>
</div>
<br>
<fieldset></fieldset>
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