JamesAndrix comments on What I've learned from Less Wrong - Less Wrong

79 Post author: Louie 20 November 2010 12:47PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (232)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: JamesAndrix 22 November 2010 01:51:40AM 0 points [-]

No.

There must be a process to turn data into hypotheses. It may be that that process in our brains is biased towards dealing with things like animal colors, but even that came from evolution being handed raw data.

The thing to keep in mind is that all the intermediate sensory processing may also be part of the process of induction (or a biased version of it.) If the data is pre-selected, then that just means that much of the inductive work has already been done. The selection could not have happened otherwise.

A less biased, more raw system might systematically look for correlations between variables, including computed variables like "What species is this?" Which can themselves be inferred from the raw data.

Doing this efficiently is a trick.