It seems that we instinctively believe in induction –that patterns which have
been repeated will continue to repeat. It seems natural to justify this belief
by saying it has worked before, except, as Eric Charles has pointed out, this
is circular.
Eric Smith has suggested an alternative justif
lrudo...@meganet.net wrote at 03/26/2012 02:28 PM:
> That is, what qualities of an asynchronous distributed
> network of agents, passing messages about a changing collection of
> diverse-but-usually-though-not-always-somewhat-aligned topics (or
> maybe more specifically goals) are conducive to "rig
Glen,
Idea ca. Godwin's law: This isn't ABM - but what about modeling it with
an ergodic homogeneous Markov chain with other appropriate stochastic
assumptions. You should be able to obtain asymptotic behavior to some
stationary distribution that represents "non-sequiturs" - if you choose
you
I agree. People who think that a fair coin is "due" to come up tails after a
string of heads are not so much anti-inductivist (or whatever term might be
used) as naive in applying the rule that over the long run, the percentage
difference between the the number of heads and number of tails ren
But there are a lot more strings that will have a tail in it (infinite, or
infinite minus one if you like) than there are strings that are all heads,
randomly generated or otherwise. If randomly generated, we assume all
strings are equally likely, so the chance of never getting a tail gets it's
fai
On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 11:23 AM, Russ Abbott wrote:
> The naive strategy for predicting coin tosses is anti-reductionist in John
> Kennison's terms. There is even a rationale. We "know" that in the long run
> (given a fair coin) the number of heads will be approximately the same as
> the number
Wait a minute, folks. Aren't we talking about Deduction here. Our theory that
the coin "should" be fair comes not from our experience but from probability
theory. To relate coin flipping to induction, don't we have to talk about a
coin of unknown fairness. How many heads do we have to flip o
To put another point of perspective on this, all coins are of unknown
fairness.
-Arlo James Barnes
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