Knowledge

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

Your initial belief (before evidence) + new evidence = updated belief.

That sounds very reasonable.

Unseen wrote:

It is not single axioms that strike me as obvious, it is a system in which consequences and premises give one another mutual support.” — Wittgenstein, On Certainty, sec. 141-42

That’s good too.  If ther…[Read more]

“When we first begin to believe anything, what we believe is not a single proposition, it is a whole system of propositions. (Light dawns gradually over the whole.) / It is not single axioms that strike me as obvious, it is a system in which consequences and premises give one another mutual support.” — Wittgenstein, On Certainty, sec. 141-42

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Bayes in action!!

Introduction to formal and informal fallacies.

Here is a more detailed explanation of Bayes Theory. Don’t be put off by the Math as the concept is more important if you are new to it.

I guess I should allow for the word “belief” and not just “understanding” as I think we all know the I don’t mean religious belief, i.e. belief that is not open to revision.

Another example:

Think of Bayes’ T…[Read more]

Reg,

Just a few practical addendum for teaching these skills in learning and reasoning:

* Put the lessons in any and all possible media, electronic and hard copy.
* Insist that anyone who teaches the lessons equally be able to exercise the lessons and they must not have any guarantee of tenure or sinecure.
*. Don’t make the lessons compulsory;…[Read more]

@ Unseen – The point you make about Columbus can be used as a basic example of Bayes Theory.  If he had being given new objective information about the location then he could have updated his understanding of what he had discovered. It would have changed his reality.  That is the essence of how Bayes works. It is not “shattering a belief”. It is d…[Read more]

Reg,

How humans learn and properly reason is a matter of fact. So it’s not that Gradgrind was wrong, It just that how to learn and reason should be the first fact he teaches

I don’t know where to fit this in, but…

Christopher Columbus did not actually discover America because he maintained until his death that he had reached some portion of Asia. Doubts were emerging but it was Amerigo Vespucci who fully realized that the Americas were truly something else, calling them a “new world.”

The point: You can only claim…[Read more]

I thought that Bayesian reasoning was about extrapolating “what is” to “what might be”, thereby limiting new ideas.

Thanks Simon, Bayesian thinking is all about checking out new ideas. We don’t want kids to hold beliefs, we want them to have “understandings”. Then when a new idea (information) comes along, they will have the skills to reason through it and adapt their understanding accordingly.

Bayesian reasoning, logic, and fallacy recognition would do more…[Read more]

I think that’s brilliant Reg.  I’m not sure about Bayesian thinking though – it seems to repackage “what’s possible” as “based on what’s already the case” – not allowing in new ideas.

I have more to add but decided to start  with this. Let’s see how it develops.

I’m told that the Buddha taught that the mind is also a sense organ.  I think that’s true, we can use the mind to know things – to join dots, distill data into knowledge.

Kristina wrote:

I think it speaks to a certain reality of what it means to be correct or to know things.

Someone said, there are at least two kinds of truth: 1) “correspondance”, where a proposition accurately captures reality; 2) “consistency”, where a proposition is logically consistent with other propositions that are known to have…[Read more]