Posted by
gepr on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Model-of-induction-tp7588431p7588468.html
Ha! Yay! Yes, now I feel like we're discussing the radicality (radicalness?) of Platonic math ... and how weird mathematicians sound (to me) when they say we're discovering theorems rather than constructing them. 8^)
Perhaps it's helpful to think about the "axiom of choice"? Is a "choosable" element somehow distinct from a "chosen" element? Does the act of choosing change the element in some way I'm unaware of? Does choosability require an agent exist and (eventually) _do_ the choosing?
On 12/14/2016 10:24 AM, Eric Charles wrote:
> Ack! Well... I guess now we're in the muck of what the heck probability and statistics are for mathematicians vs. scientists. Of note, my understanding is that statistics was a field for at least a few decades before it was specified in a formal enough way to be invited into the hallows of mathematics departments, and that it is still frequently viewed with suspicion there.
>
> Glen states: /We talk of "selecting" or "choosing" subsets or elements from larger sets. But such "selection" isn't an action in time. Such "selection" is an already extant property of that organization of sets./
>
> I find such talk quite baffling. When I talk about selecting or choosing or assigning, I am talking about an action in time. Often I'm talking about an action that I personally performed. "You are in condition A. You are in condition B. You are in condition A." etc. Maybe I flip a coin when you walk into my lab room, maybe I pre-generated some random numbers, maybe I look at the second hand of my watch as soon as you walk in, maybe I write down a number "arbitrarily", etc. At any rate, you are not in a condition before I put you in one, and whatever it is I want to measure about you hasn't happened yet.
>
> I fully admit that we can model the system without reference to time, if we want to. Such efforts might yield keen insights. If Glen had said that we can usefully model what we are interested in as an organized set with such-and-such properties, and time no where to be found, that might seem pretty reasonable. But that would be a formal model produced for specific purposes, not the actual phenomenon of interest. Everything interesting that we want to describe as "probable" and all the conclusions we want to come to "statistically" are, for the lab scientist, time dependent phenomena. (I assert.)
--
☣ glen
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