Could you somehow prove that there is no optimal learning theory, or do you derive your rejection of rationalism just from your difficulty to find it?
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Replying to @Plinz
There can be no absolute proofs about anything in the macroscopic world. However, there are stronger and weaker arguments. And there are strong reasons to think there can be no optimal learning theory…
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Replying to @Meaningness @Plinz
Philosophers of science spent decades trying to find a provably correct theory of induction. Instead, they found more and more reasons to think that no such theory is possible.
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Replying to @Meaningness @Plinz
Half a century ago, the field switched to trying to understand more clearly why no such theory is possible, and (more importantly) why science often works anyway.
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Replying to @Meaningness @Plinz
There are many different reasons (which the Eggplant book is supposed to explain). A simple one: there are always unboundedly many things that *might* happen, that you can’t know about.
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Replying to @Meaningness @Plinz
Relatedly: you can never interpret data without making unboundedly many implicit ontological assumptions.
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Replying to @Meaningness @Plinz
My understanding is that serious statisticians acknowledge this. Any statistical inference on unboundedly many “ceteris paribus” assumptions, most of which cannot be justified by data.
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Replying to @Meaningness @Plinz
Failure to recognize this is one major underlying cause of the present replication crisis.
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Replying to @Meaningness
I think the opposite it true: the replication crisis is the result of people believing that they can wing it somehow, without understanding the mathematical foundations of their statistical tools.
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Replying to @Plinz
Working scientists mostly don’t understand the math. But that’s less of a problem than not understanding how the math relates to reality, imo.
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This article is not ideal, but it lists many common misconceptions about how (frequentist) stats relate to reality. These aren’t math misunderstandings, they are real-world interpretation misunderstandings. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-016-0149-3 …
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Replying to @Meaningness @Plinz
There are corresponding (fatal) misunderstandings about how Bayesian methods relate to reality.
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