Friday, February 14, 2003, 12:46:21 AM, James Rogers wrote: JR> The predictive accuracy of any system becomes extremely poor in the absence JR> of sufficient information. In these cases, whatever scant information is JR> available serves as the prior; expecting quality results in this scenario is JR> unwarranted and not supported mathematically. Also, the possibility of a JR> low probability hypothesis being correct is something that we must always JR> consider, whether dealing with human deception or engineering. The same JR> rules apply.
But don't the probabilities *change* in the presence of conscious, possibly deceptive, behaviour, when compared to unconscious "mechanical" behaviour? Isn't there a sense in which Occam's razor is *very useful* when dealing with purely physical phenomena such as gravity, and *much less so* when dealing with phenomena that are the result of, for lack of a better term, "psychic events" such as human decisions? Your statement that The predictive accuracy of any system becomes extremely poor in the absence of sufficient information. begs the question "what is sufficient"? No system is going to have *all* the information about the Universe, since the point is to profitably predict (or bet on) some of it. It seems to me that predicting the behaviour of an organism requires vastly more information than predicting physical events, and that there's something important about that fact -- that prediction becomes more difficult far more quickly than linearly. -- Cliff ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?[EMAIL PROTECTED]
