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Fundoo Professor is worth study

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Fundoo Professor is worth study
Post by DDHvi   » Thu Jan 07, 2016 6:52 am

DDHvi
Captain (Junior Grade)

Posts: 365
Joined: Mon Dec 15, 2014 8:16 pm

I stumbled on Sanjay Bakshi, known as Fundoo Professor on the net, and found his work worth study. An example:

It’s obvious that inculcating the habit of thinking like a Bayesian is an admirable quality.
Indeed, thinking like a Bayesian is a way of life. If you learn it and practice it, it will change
you in many ways. It changed Julia Galef as she explains in this
video
8
:
After you’ve been steeped in Bayes’ rule for a little while, it starts to produce some fundamental changes
to your thinking. For example, you become much more aware that your beliefs are grayscale. They’re
not black and white and that you have levels of confidence in your beliefs about how the world works
that are less than 100 percent but greater than zero percent and even more importantly as you go
through the world and encounter new ideas and new evidence, that level of confidence fluctuates, as
you encounter evidence for and against your beliefs.
Also, I think that many people, certainly including myself have this default way of approaching the
world in which we have our pre existing beliefs. We go through the world and we pretty much stick to
our beliefs unless we encounter evidence that’s so overwhelmingly inconsistent with our beliefs about
the world that forces us to change our minds and adopt a new theory of how the world works. And
sometimes, even then we we don’t do it.
So, the implicit question that people ask themselves, as they go through the world is this: When I see
new evidence, can this be explained with my theory? And, if the answer is yes, then we stop there. But
after you’ve got some familiarity with Bayes’ rule, what you start doing is instead of stopping after
asking yourself can this evidence be explained with my own pet theory, you also ask well would it be
explained better with some other theory or maybe is some other theory is this actually evidence for my
theory


Not knowing about the formal Bayesian thinking logic didn't prevent getting the basic idea.

Douglas Hvistendahl
Retired technical nerd
ddhviste@drtel.net

Dumb mistakes are very irritating.
Smart mistakes go on forever
Unless you test your assumptions!

Sanjay Bakshi discusses other things worth understanding. Even if the understanding is partial ;)

From the same item:

I realize that if you ask people to account for “facts”, they usually spend more time finding reasons for
them than finding out whether they are true...They skip over the facts but carefully deduce inferences.
They normally begin thus: “How does this come about?” But does it do so? That is what they ought to
be asking. (Montaigne)
Douglas Hvistendahl
Retired technical nerd
ddhviste@drtel.net

Dumb mistakes are very irritating.
Smart mistakes go on forever
Unless you test your assumptions!
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