3 ms·

this seems like a complete over simplification and naive analysis of the situation - and the argument smells like a straw man and appeal to authority, comparing

by jheriko 14y ago

this seems like a complete over simplification and naive analysis of the situation - and the argument smells like a straw man and appeal to authority, comparing it to sherlock holmes - who incidentally /is obviously wrong/. the idea that 'whatever remains' is quantifiable and finite in the real world is a stark contrast with reality - and actually the fact that a probability is precisely 0 or 1 is very significant to its power in drawing conclusions. so not only does forbidding probability not forbid sherlock holmes style 'logic' but his logic is broken anyway in the vast majority of real world cases. what the court says is common sense... its a shame it offends some academic view... oh, no, wait, it really isn't.

Anderkent 14y ago
and the argument smells like a straw man and appeal to authority, comparing it to sherlock holmes A humorous reference to literature is hardly an appeal to authority. who incidentally /is obviously wrong/ He's not /obviously wrong/, he's subtly wrong in not explicitly acknowledging that the enumeration of options, not evaluation of their probability, is usually the difficult part. He's obviously right if you assume all possibilities are enumerated. actually the fact that a probability is precisely 0 or 1 is very significant to its power in drawing conclusions 0 and 1 are not probabilities, and while certainty has power in drawing conclusions, it only really occurs in purely theoretical discussions. what the court says is common sense... Whether it's common sense or not does not make it valid. oh, no, wait, it really isn't Is that about it being common sense, or it offending academic views?
jacques_chester 14y ago
> this seems like a complete over simplification and naive analysis of the situation The key phrase in the linked article: > and so I must now tell them that the entire philosophy behind their course has been declared illegal in the Court of Appeal. I hope they don't mind. Is what reveals the misunderstanding. Judges don't "declare" things illegal, they rule on matters of what the law is. That the law requires judgements to be rendered in certain terms is not a statement of the legality of making Bayesian arguments. The law requires a decision. The conceptual basis of the common law is a promise that a court will always render a clear and specific set of rulings or orders, and that there will always be an explanation of those rulings or orders. Judges are not free to say to disputants that they are X% likely to win their claim. This is one of those places where Bayesian probability isn't a good fit. Fuzzy logic -- so passé these days -- at least has an understood mechanism for "defuzzifying" in a fashion which lawyers would find quite familiar. It also overlooks that judges have many other places to introduce flexibility and weighed judgement. For example, judges may assign blame in portions for some crimes or torts; they may reject, moderate or modify some claims in equity; they have leeway to combine multiple considerations and legislative constraints in handing down criminal sentences and so on. One thing that bugs me tremendously about outsiders looking in at law is the assumption that, since lawyers don't immediately and entirely embrace new idea X, they are fusty old fools who are an impediment to the good. It's an argument born of ignorance that lawyers are deliberately obtuse fools, or judges out-of-touch theoreticians. Lawyers and judges touch on more problem domains in more depth, with greater consequences, than pretty much every academic and every software developer.
- davorak 14y ago
  >> and so I must now tell them that the entire philosophy behind their course has been declared illegal in the Court of Appeal. I hope they don't mind. >Is what reveals the misunderstanding. Judges don't "declare" things illegal, they rule on matters of what the law is. That the law requires judgements to be rendered in certain terms is not a statement of the legality of making Bayesian arguments. The write seems to be assuming that the court case sets a president that make it hard if not impossible to use Bayesian reasoning in the court room and sums it up as "illegal". > The law requires a decision. The conceptual basis of the common law is a promise that a court will always render a clear and specific set of rulings or orders, and that there will always be an explanation of those rulings or orders. I thought this was a civil case and did not require "beyond a shadow of doubt." but rather just high probability a term I have heard is that it requires a preponderance of evidence. Bayesian statistics/reasoning is supposed to help come to a conclusion with a high likely hood of being correct which seems like the file state I want a judge to be in when ruling. What is not good or counter productive about this state brought about by Bayesian methods?
  - jacques_chester 14y ago
    The problem is that the law requires a statement of cause in order to apportion responsibility. It cannot abide uncertainty at the moment of judgement. It is accepted that, because in civil cases, the consequences of misjudgement are less severe, it is acceptable to relax the standard of judgement to "balance of probabilities". Note the case that was mentioned inline that this case was affirming: Hotson v East Berkshire Area Health Authority[1]. First of all, the linked poster should be railing at that decision, this one merely takes it as precedent. In Hotson there was a question about causality based on the given probability of a child's recovery. Given that a child that fell out of a tree was estimated to be 25% likely to recover, medical staff seemed to have taken the view that the child was basically a hopeless case. Perhaps if they hadn't, went the reasoning, the child might have done better because the staff would have tried harder. In that were so, some responsibility could be apportioned to the Health Authority, and not just to the child falling out of a tree. The Lords ruled that the only thing that certainly happened was the child falling out of the tree. Counterfactuals based on probabilities couldn't be admitted because there's no way to reliably nail the damn things down. Anybody can come along with a different Bayesian network and give you a different estimate. What mattered, in the view of the Lords, was what could be verifiably said to have actually happened. A more-than-standard disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. I was terrible at torts. Torts law is notorious tricky and can vary very widely from country to country -- I studied in Australia and these cases are in England. This post does not constitute legal advice. Hell, it doesn't even make for good reading.
andrewaylett 14y ago
I much prefer Douglas Adams' reformulation: When you have eliminated the improbable, whatever is left, however impossible, must be the truth. After all, it's pretty much certain that you don't know everything, isn't it? (For clarity: I'm not entirely serious, but I do agree with the parent's opinion on Sherlock Holmes.)

by jheriko 14y ago

Anderkent 14y ago

and the argument smells like a straw man and appeal to authority, comparing it to sherlock holmes A humorous reference to literature is hardly an appeal to authority. who incidentally /is obviously wrong/ He's not /obviously wrong/, he's subtly wrong in not explicitly acknowledging that the enumeration of options, not evaluation of their probability, is usually the difficult part. He's obviously right if you assume all possibilities are enumerated. actually the fact that a probability is precisely 0 or 1 is very significant to its power in drawing conclusions 0 and 1 are not probabilities, and while certainty has power in drawing conclusions, it only really occurs in purely theoretical discussions. what the court says is common sense... Whether it's common sense or not does not make it valid. oh, no, wait, it really isn't Is that about it being common sense, or it offending academic views?

jacques_chester 14y ago

> this seems like a complete over simplification and naive analysis of the situation The key phrase in the linked article: > and so I must now tell them that the entire philosophy behind their course has been declared illegal in the Court of Appeal. I hope they don't mind. Is what reveals the misunderstanding. Judges don't "declare" things illegal, they rule on matters of what the law is. That the law requires judgements to be rendered in certain terms is not a statement of the legality of making Bayesian arguments. The law requires a decision. The conceptual basis of the common law is a promise that a court will always render a clear and specific set of rulings or orders, and that there will always be an explanation of those rulings or orders. Judges are not free to say to disputants that they are X% likely to win their claim. This is one of those places where Bayesian probability isn't a good fit. Fuzzy logic -- so passé these days -- at least has an understood mechanism for "defuzzifying" in a fashion which lawyers would find quite familiar. It also overlooks that judges have many other places to introduce flexibility and weighed judgement. For example, judges may assign blame in portions for some crimes or torts; they may reject, moderate or modify some claims in equity; they have leeway to combine multiple considerations and legislative constraints in handing down criminal sentences and so on. One thing that bugs me tremendously about outsiders looking in at law is the assumption that, since lawyers don't immediately and entirely embrace new idea X, they are fusty old fools who are an impediment to the good. It's an argument born of ignorance that lawyers are deliberately obtuse fools, or judges out-of-touch theoreticians. Lawyers and judges touch on more problem domains in more depth, with greater consequences, than pretty much every academic and every software developer.

davorak 14y ago
>> and so I must now tell them that the entire philosophy behind their course has been declared illegal in the Court of Appeal. I hope they don't mind. >Is what reveals the misunderstanding. Judges don't "declare" things illegal, they rule on matters of what the law is. That the law requires judgements to be rendered in certain terms is not a statement of the legality of making Bayesian arguments. The write seems to be assuming that the court case sets a president that make it hard if not impossible to use Bayesian reasoning in the court room and sums it up as "illegal". > The law requires a decision. The conceptual basis of the common law is a promise that a court will always render a clear and specific set of rulings or orders, and that there will always be an explanation of those rulings or orders. I thought this was a civil case and did not require "beyond a shadow of doubt." but rather just high probability a term I have heard is that it requires a preponderance of evidence. Bayesian statistics/reasoning is supposed to help come to a conclusion with a high likely hood of being correct which seems like the file state I want a judge to be in when ruling. What is not good or counter productive about this state brought about by Bayesian methods?
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  The problem is that the law requires a statement of cause in order to apportion responsibility. It cannot abide uncertainty at the moment of judgement. It is accepted that, because in civil cases, the consequences of misjudgement are less severe, it is acceptable to relax the standard of judgement to "balance of probabilities". Note the case that was mentioned inline that this case was affirming: Hotson v East Berkshire Area Health Authority[1]. First of all, the linked poster should be railing at that decision, this one merely takes it as precedent. In Hotson there was a question about causality based on the given probability of a child's recovery. Given that a child that fell out of a tree was estimated to be 25% likely to recover, medical staff seemed to have taken the view that the child was basically a hopeless case. Perhaps if they hadn't, went the reasoning, the child might have done better because the staff would have tried harder. In that were so, some responsibility could be apportioned to the Health Authority, and not just to the child falling out of a tree. The Lords ruled that the only thing that certainly happened was the child falling out of the tree. Counterfactuals based on probabilities couldn't be admitted because there's no way to reliably nail the damn things down. Anybody can come along with a different Bayesian network and give you a different estimate. What mattered, in the view of the Lords, was what could be verifiably said to have actually happened. A more-than-standard disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. I was terrible at torts. Torts law is notorious tricky and can vary very widely from country to country -- I studied in Australia and these cases are in England. This post does not constitute legal advice. Hell, it doesn't even make for good reading.

andrewaylett 14y ago

I much prefer Douglas Adams' reformulation: When you have eliminated the improbable, whatever is left, however impossible, must be the truth. After all, it's pretty much certain that you don't know everything, isn't it? (For clarity: I'm not entirely serious, but I do agree with the parent's opinion on Sherlock Holmes.)