I learned Bayesian methods in my statistics courses and was taught to be skeptical of the magical powers that some attributed to them. Some of my professors knew about Peirce's distinction between abduction and induction and some did not, but either way they knew you can't get inductive hemoglobin out of deductive turnips.
In a long series of jobs doing databases and statistical computing for everything from medical education to tropical epidemiology I learned that practitioners and researchers in the real world were even more suspicious of the Bayes mystique. When you have lots of variables and very large contingency tables then many cells are filled with empirical frequencies and many more are either "missing data" or filled by guessing. There be abduction here, whether you assume the samples are on target with the long run or whether the prior is pure hypothesis. Of course people use their best guesses all the time but they need to keep a weather eye out for better. Regards, Jon http://inquiryintoinquiry.com > On Mar 26, 2015, at 6:41 PM, John Collier <[email protected]> wrote: > > Ironic, yes, and it shows how dependent Bayes methods are on priors. Pick bad > priors (and that can even involve assigning equal probability to all > unknowns) and with a bit of bad luck you can end up in a self-confirming > loop. But usually it works. > > My Bayesian spam detector (actually Microsoft's which is really stupid in the > information it uses, and keeps blocking people on the Peirce list). > > John > > -----Original Message----- > From: Jon Awbrey [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: March 26, 2015 7:25 PM > To: Danko Nikolic > Cc: [email protected] > Subject: [PEIRCE-L] Re: Bayes and abduction > > PS. I know how to spell Bayes but my autospellbot, which is very likely a > Bayesbot, thinks that a very unlikely sequence of letters. Ironic, no? > > Jon > > http://inquiryintoinquiry.com > >> On Mar 26, 2015, at 4:24 PM, Jon Awbrey <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Danko, List, >> >> Bates' Rule is a mathematical theorem, that is, a deductive transformation >> that can at best preserve the information in the data. Thus it is >> explicative where abduction and induction are ampliative. >> >> This is an old controversy that Peirce had with, I think it was the >> Neyman-Pearson school of thought? >> >> There used to be a lot of literature and some understanding of this >> point among AI folk, but that may be forgotten now. That happens >> periodically . >> >> Regards, >> >> Jon >> >> http://inquiryintoinquiry.com >> >>> On Mar 26, 2015, at 1:30 PM, Danko Nikolic <[email protected]> >>> wrote: >>> >>> Dear, >>> >>> There was one more question that bugged me while writing the paper on >>> practopoiesis: There has been a lot of work on Bayesian inference in the >>> brain. So, my fear was that people who worked on Bayesian aspects of brain >>> computation would argue that all the issues regarding logical abduction >>> have been addressed through Bayesian-related work. >>> >>> First, I have to say that my fear was not really grounded and for a strange >>> reason. It turned out that all the experts on Bayesian inference who I >>> talked to have never heard of logical abduction. That was kind of sad, but >>> still did not solve the problem. >>> >>> My intuition is that abduction is much more than Bayesian inference, but I >>> have hard time defending this stance. >>> >>> Can anybody tell me more about that relation? If one shows that a neural >>> circuit performs Bayesian inference, has it been automatically shown that >>> the circuit can perform logical abduction? I guess not. But I would like to >>> know more about that. >>> >>> The way I treated the issue in the paper was that I discussed primarily >>> abduction and then briefly mentioned Bayes at the end as "related". I am >>> not sure whether I could have done a better job. >>> >>> Thank you very much. >>> >>> Best regards, >>> >>> Danko >>> >>> -- >>> Prof. Dr. Danko Nikolić >>> >>> Web: >>> http://www.danko-nikolic.com >>> >>> Mail address 1: >>> Department of Neurophysiology >>> Max Planck Institut for Brain Research Deutschordenstr. 46 >>> 60528 Frankfurt am Main >>> GERMANY >>> >>> Mail address 2: >>> Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies Wolfgang Goethe University >>> Ruth-Moufang-Str. 1 >>> 60433 Frankfurt am Main >>> GERMANY >>> >>> ---------------------------- >>> Office: (..49-69) 96769-736 >>> Lab: (..49-69) 96769-209 >>> Fax: (..49-69) 96769-327 >>> [email protected] >>> ---------------------------- > > > >
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