[FRIAM] Celeste Kidd - How to Know

Fri Feb 14 10:58:47 EST 2020

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
http://www.fitelson.org/probability/ramsey.pdf, 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,
https://hnn.us/article/174250.

Ramsey's first essay commences with these epigrams:

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.

> -- Aristotle.

> 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.

> -- W. F. Donkits.

> 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.

> -- C. S. Peirce.

> Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believed.

> -- W. Blake.

The epigram by W. F. Donkits in this paper is apparently the only place his
name appears on the internet.

What follows to the end of the section is almost entirely based on the
> writings of C. S. Peirce. [Especially his
> "Illustrations of the Logic of Science", Popular Science Monthly, 1877 and
> 1878, reprinted in Chance Love and Logic
> (1923).]

Back to Popular Science again!

-- rec --

On Sun, Dec 29, 2019 at 11:43 AM Roger Critchlow <rec at elf.org> wrote:

> 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.
>
> Andrew Gelman linked this paper,
> https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/81961261.pdf, 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:
>
>> 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]
>
> 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.
>
> -- rec --
>
> On Sat, Dec 28, 2019 at 10:23 AM Steven A Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>
>> REC -
>>
>> Good find!
>>
>> 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.).
>>
>> 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".
>>
>> - Steve
>>
>>
>> On 12/27/19 8:21 PM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
>>
>> This talk was mentioned on hacker news this week and inspired my babbling
>> at Saveur this morning.  https://slideslive.com/38921495/how-to-know.
>> The talk was delivered at Neural IPS on December 9 and discusses recent
>> research on how people come to believe they know something.
>>
>> This paper https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.1162/opmi_a_00017 describes
>> the Amazon Mechanical Turk experiment on people becoming certain they
>> understood the boolean rule they were being taught by examples.
>>
>> -- rec --
>>
>>
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>
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