Re: Programming is the Engineering Discipline of the Science that is Mathematics

From: Bob Badour <bbadour_at_pei.sympatico.ca>
Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2006 00:55:58 GMT
Message-ID: <yY2jg.20862$A26.479241_at_ursa-nb00s0.nbnet.nb.ca>


Keith H Duggar wrote:

> Bob Badour wrote:
>

>>vc wrote:
>>
>>>Bob Badour wrote:
>>>
>>>>Are you seriously suggesting that true and false are
>>>>trivial and uninteresting? Should we all pack up and
>>>>go home?
>>>
>>>I am suggesting that a meaningful PT statement reduction
>>>to a propositional logic statement is trivial and
>>>uninteresting.
>>
>>Then why did you bring it up in the first place?

>
> Actually, during the course of his recent wikipeducation
> (yes it was that obvious, VC), he has variously attacked
> the reduction as (in order more or less):
>
> false
> cute
> false
> impossible
> funny
> funnier
> "mindless playing with equations"
> flawed
>
> and now finally
>
> trivial and uninteresting
>
> and throughout VC has never once been able to admit his
> mistakes nor has he been able to admit that he learned
> something. Typical pathetic VI behavior.

Not having immediate access to Jaynes' book, I had to admit that my own knowledge of this comes from a quick wikipeducation. I would not be quite so quick to dismiss VC as a VI.

However, it seems his objections are philosophical in nature, which I generally find boring and irrelevant. My wikipeducation tells me that while there are plenty of frequentists and subjectivist bayesians who do not fully agree with Jaynes, there are plenty of objectivist bayesians who do agree with him.

As an engineer, I tend to the pragmatic and find myself much more sympathetic to the eclectic philosophy.

Had you been arguing to replace the deductive relational model with an inductive model, I would have to reject the idea at this time. However, I don't recall you ever making any such suggestion.

While I can imagine some fields benefiting from conditional probability and while I am aware of some very useful applications of it, I think a deductive formalism better suits data management. The relational model certainly does not prevent anyone from recording statements about probabilities.

Probability theory is an interesting topic to me, and it is a topic I would like to learn a lot more about. Thank you for the suggestions.

While it's true that some VI frequently try to confuse issues by making useless philosophical arguments, I am not yet convinced that VC is a VI. Joe, for instance, is infamous for making obscure references to ancient fallacious arguments or to irrelevant quirks related only to infinite sets. However, based on my very limited understanding, one could view VC's posts as challenging the idea that probability theory makes a good generalization of deductive logic. Thus, it is possible in my mind that you and he are simply talking past each other.

You might be in a much better position to judge, though, and again thank you for the suggestions. Received on Mon Jun 12 2006 - 02:55:58 CEST

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