A
on studies of formal logic as an embodied, situated, social, cultural, materially-mediated activity.
This view contrasts with:
1 formal logics as Platonic mathematical objects
2 formal logic as an innate mental capacity
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inspired by @cdutilhnovaes’ _Formal Languages in Logic_, about why formality is useful. Her overall explanation of how formal rationality works is closely similar to mine in _The Eggplant_ draft, so it was exciting reading! https://amzn.to/2NQNsxa2 replies 0 retweets 16 likesShow this thread -
The traditional explanation for the power of logic is “expressive precision,” but the experience of attempting to use logic in AI is that it totally fails for that. Specifically, whenever it encounters nebulosity, which is the main point of Part I of _The Eggplant_.
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Another traditional virtue of logic is truth preservation (true premises => true conclusions); but there are nearly no absolute truths in the eggplant-sized world, and deduction does not preserve mostly-truth. So that’s not the answer outside applications in math and CS.pic.twitter.com/JZBRjPqrUH
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Replying to @Meaningness
This example is where probability theory and Bayesian stuff come in. "Sort-of all ravens are black" is really "most ravens are black". The formal outcome is "Huginn is more likely to be black", which might be a useful thing to know.
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Replying to @LightningShade0 @Meaningness
And it becomes ever more useful as the number of specific ravens you need to reason about increases.
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Replying to @nycplayer @LightningShade0
Maybe not:pic.twitter.com/7SezZ1iODq
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Replying to @Meaningness @LightningShade0
My practical application of this is poker, where I can be wrong once in a while but being correct just slightly more often than average can be very profitable. So I care less about whether *all* ravens are black, and more about guessing correctly if the next one will be.
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Probability theory works for gambling because gambling games were engineered to fit the rules of probability theory, and vice versa. It doesn’t work for almost anything else.
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Replying to @Meaningness @LightningShade0
Well, I think there are applications in any situation with incomplete information, competing interests, and non-deterministic inputs - for example, military tactics. Or salesmanship.
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Replying to @nycplayer @Meaningness
The change will be that gambling situations can be modeled precisely, while military tactics often can't. You'll be working with an *approximate* probability, and yet, that's still useful in practice.
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