Glen,
I like it. Very well put.
Grant
On 6/9/15 9:56 AM, glen wrote:
Statistics is one tool. I'm not sure it's the most powerful tool, though. I tend to think the
best tool is ... well, it goes by many names. One name is "active listening" ...
"empathy" ... etc. The technique is well known to all of us (well unless we're autistic
or psychopathic). When you hear someone say something that just sounds wrong, there are 2 basic
steps:
1) find out why you think they're wrong (including the statistics that surround
any of the facts involved), and
2) try to figure out what the speaker _really_ means by whatever nonsense
they're spouting.
Since I don't believe our thoughts are very accurate at all, I have no problems
empathizing with someone who spouts (apparent) nonsense. I do it myself on a
regular basis. I try not to. But it's difficult. In fact, the reason I find
purposeful nonsense (including climate denial or chemtrails, but more like
chatbots) so cool is because of the accidental nonsense in which we bathe.
On 06/09/2015 08:36 AM, Grant Holland wrote:
Righto. So what we do is put a measure on "how much confidence" we have. Statistics gives us some
tools for that - namely the "moment functionals" (mean, variance, skewness, etc.); and information
theory gives us some more general tools for that - entropy and the other entropic funtionals. So maybe it's a
mixture of the relative and the absolute. Maybe we've moved up to the "junior" level?
Grant
On 6/9/15 9:14 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
Correct. Nothing is certain. We've known that since Kant. NOW what? That
there are no certain facts does not imply that some facts are not more
enduring and useful than others. We need to get beyond the sophomoric
revelation that "everything is relative."
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