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Jaynes discusses this in Chapter 10 of Probability Theory: The Logic of Science. His real aim is to seperate the concepts of having to take a decision without k
by alan-crowe 17y ago
Jaynes discusses this in Chapter 10 of Probability Theory: The Logic of Science. His real aim is to seperate the concepts of having to take a decision without knowing all the facts versus having to take a decision in the face of some kind of intrinsic randomness. Having seperated the two concepts he then argues that probability theory is about the former, with the later something of a red herring.
So he emphasises that coin tosses obey the laws of physics and are not random, but we use them anyway because we don't know the facts that we need to know in order to call the toss. He included experimental results of successful cheating, but with a jam jar lid instead of a coin. Clearly we call a coin toss "random" because of the practical difficulties involved in predicting the motion of a disk much smaller than a jam jar lid.