• fdrake
    5.9k
    I have no idea what you mean.
  • Jeremiah
    1.5k


    This is rapidly getting very tedious, and now I feel you are just purposely being obtuse.
  • fdrake
    5.9k
    I'm really not. What actually is your question, and what do you think we disagree on? What is the distinction between choosing and making that you refer to, and how is it relevant to the discussion?
  • Jeremiah
    1.5k


    Ya, I am not buying that act at all. Unless you think a null distribution is divinely supplied by the god of statistics.
  • fdrake
    5.9k
    You claimed that I was misunderstanding your points and that all my comments are off the mark. I gave you an opportunity to set me straight.

    No, null distributions are not supplied by God [despite how hypothesis testing is often treated in the applied sciences], they are a combination of distributional assumptions that usually allow the derivation of the test statistic and of specific values of that distribution referred to in the hypothesis. I have no idea this relates to what you're talking about. So I'll ask again.

    What actually is your question, and what do you think we disagree on? What is the distinction between choosing and making that you refer to, and how is it relevant to the discussion? Now, how is the null distribution related to the discussion?
  • Jeremiah
    1.5k


    Ya, I am not playing. What is the difference between choosing and making? Really? Even a non-statistician knows their differences between the two. You dodged the question and now you are dodging it again.
  • fdrake
    5.9k
    I have no idea what you mean. Please set me straight.
  • Jeremiah
    1.5k
    I can clearly see you are now playing a game. You are not that slick.
  • Jeremiah
    1.5k


    Here, let me show you how I solve people who repeatedly engage in such misdirection.
  • fdrake
    5.9k
    I'm not slick at all. The game I'm playing is 'What can I do to understand whatever disagreement I have with Jeremiah?', now that 'Asking Jeramiah to tell me how he disagrees with me' is out of the question, I have absolutely no clue of how to proceed. Your move.
  • Srap Tasmaner
    4.6k

    If you just mean the usual way, then we choose from among things that already exist, but things we make don't exist until we make them. If this what you mean?
  • Jeremiah
    1.5k
    As far as I am aware statistics was created by humans. I guess I could be wrong maybe a magical statistics fairy zapped it into existence.
  • fdrake
    5.9k
    Mockery isn't a good substitute for a reasoned belief.
  • Jeremiah
    1.5k
    I never promised to be reasonable.
  • fdrake
    5.9k
    Read the site guidelines thread.
  • Jeremiah
    1.5k
    I am aware and ready to live with the outcome of my actions. That is the only way to have true freedom.
  • Srap Tasmaner
    4.6k
    As far as I am aware statistics was created by humans.Jeremiah

    Sure. Do you draw some conclusion from this? For instance, do you have an answer to the question you posed:

    Does the string have length because that is an objective property of the string, or does it have length because we created the ruler?Jeremiah
  • Jeremiah
    1.5k


    It is the interaction of the two.
  • TheMadFool
    13.8k
    My view is that at the macro-scale there are specific physical laws. Force, mass, velocity, the factors relevant at that scale, are all governed by fixed principles/laws. So, all causation, at that scale, is predictable i.e. there is no chance.

    Chance/probability, therefore, can't be objective. As you said, it's just an approximation...of complex causation.

    Why do you think chance/probability is objective?
  • Jeremiah
    1.5k
    All of science is about attempting to make predictive models including statistics.
  • sime
    1k
    Let's reverse the question:

    Is "Lawfulness" an objectively meaningful concept in a sense that transcends human psychology, practical decision-making and mathematical convention?

    Given that a human being can only make a finite sequence of observations, i don't see what either "objectively lawful" or "objectively random" could add to the description of a human being's life experiences taken as a whole.

    The only response i can imagine is

    "Lawfulness concerns only the predictability of future observations in relation to past observations".

    But how can "lawfulness" refer to observations that haven't happened?

    Assuming we aren't fortune tellers or psychics whose minds literally peer into the future, this must be another way of saying

    "lawfulness describes the similarity of one previously observed pattern to another previously observed pattern that are for practical purposes considered to be comparable via the invention of some convention for human purposes whereby the positions on one pattern are said to be 'equivalent' to positions on the other pattern".

    In which case "lawfulness" merely describes how similar a sub-sequence of observations is to another sub-sequence of observations within the super-sequence of observations it is part of, relative to a convention that defines a notion of 'similarity' to allow for sub-sequence comparisons.

    None of this leads to any impression that "lawfulness" is is in any sense objective or diametrically opposed to the converse convention of 'chance' or non-repeatability.
123456Next
bold
italic
underline
strike
code
quote
ulist
image
url
mention
reveal
youtube
tweet
Add a Comment

Welcome to The Philosophy Forum!

Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.