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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