Anon sent a question about Bertrand’s Paradox. The paradox is supposed to show something has gone wrong with our thinking in probability. And it has, but not in the way its proponents […]
A Twist In A Solution To Newcomb’s Paradox
Let’s take a break from the insanity and wade into cool waters to start the weekend. I’ll take it that you’ve watched this video, which purports to give a solution to Newcomb’s […]
Our Base Metaphors & Analogies Used In Science Have Outlived Their Usefulness: Part I
Metaphors and analogies exhaust themselves. No matter how useful they are as guides to thought, pushed too far they can loosen our grip on Reality or lead to stagnation, and they can […]
All Of The Supposed Paradoxes About The Principle Of Indifference Are Bogus
Here is an example of a supposed paradox caused by using Keyne’s Principle of Indifference, which Stove and others (and myself) call the Statistical Syllogism (itself deduced from the symmetry of logical […]
A Probability Non-Paradox
Before you is a box in which is a slip of paper on which is written either ‘0’, ‘1’, ‘2’, or ‘3’. Given that premise, what is the probability of X = […]
The Ethics Of Precrime
This is Part II of our discussion of predicting individual crime. See Part I. The moral question is this: should an authority take action against you if an algorithm spits out a […]
The Problem Of Grue Isn’t; Or, A Gruesome Non-Paradox About Induction
Skepticism about induction happens only among academic philosophers, and only in print. Tell an induction skeptic to take a long walk off a short dock or hint that his health insurance will […]
What Statistics Really Is: Paradox Digression
Read Part I We’re taking a small digression to answer a question put by Deborah Mayo in Part I, pointing to this article on her site. Mayo should be on everybody’s list […]
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