jsteinhardt comments on The Logic of the Hypothesis Test: A Steel Man - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Matt_Simpson 21 February 2013 06:19AM

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Comment author: prase 21 February 2013 07:59:12PM *  2 points [-]

a way of doing induction without trying to solve the problem of induction

Well, this is the thing I have problems to understand. The problem of induction is a "problem" due to the existence of incompatible philosophical approaches; there is no "problem of deduction" to solve because everybody agrees how to do that (mostly). Doing induction without solving the problem would be possible if people agreed how to do it and the disagreement was confined to inconsequential philosophical interpretations of the process. Then it would indeed be wise to do the practical stuff and ignore the philosophy.

But this is probably not the case; people seem to disagree about how to do the induction, and there are people (well represented on this site) who have reservations against frequentist hypothesis testing. I am confused.

Comment author: jsteinhardt 25 February 2013 03:15:10AM 0 points [-]

I think Matt's point is that under essentially all seriously proposed versions of induction currently in existence, the technique he described constitutes a valid inductive inference, therefore, in at least the cases where hypothesis testing works, we don't have to worry about resolving the different approaches.

Comment author: prase 25 February 2013 05:30:16PM 0 points [-]

Couldn't this be said about any inductive method, at least in cases when the method works?