An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic by Ian Hacking

Have any of you read this book?

I have been invited to join a reading group based around it for the coming academic year and would like the opinions of this group as to whether it's worth it.

I may join in just for the section on Bayes. I might even finally discover the correct pronunciation of "Bayesian". ("Bay-zian" or "Bye-zian"?)

Here's a link to the book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Introduction-Probability-Inductive-Logic/dp/0521775019/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1283464939&sr=8-2

The instruction you describe is pretty much a description of what most people experience growing up, through a combination of what their parents teach them and experience/trial and error.

HughRistik was discussing the possibility of helping people to develop these sorts of skills who for whatever reason failed to acquire them when growing up. Many people claim that explicit instruction can be a valuable tool in developing such skills later in life. If true this is a lot more useful to people suffering from this problem than your 'advice'.

The former is genuinely learning conversation, the latter is trying to fake it.

To riff on HughRistik's music analogy, is a guitar player 'trying to fake it' by practicing scales and chords and learning musical theory before they have mastered improvisation?

You seem to be denying the possibility of teaching anyone to be better at conversation by explaining various norms, rules and constraints to them and getting them to practice while consciously attending to this information, at least initially.

I don't think anyone would deny that the ultimate aim of any such instruction would be for the student to internalize the rules to an extent that they were applied largely unconsciously and automatically - most skills make this progression as they are developed. However I've seen plenty of people claim that instruction of this kind can be effective at improving conversational skills for people who are not able to 'just do it' as you seem to advise. Convincing evidence to the contrary would help save people from fruitless expenditure of time, money and effort trying to develop conversational skills if you were able to provide it.

I don't think there is really such a thing as introverted and extroverted people at all. People are encouraged to think of these things as part of their "essential character" (TM) - or even their biology.

Here's some evidence the other way -- paywalled, but the gist is on the first page.

The second paragraph.

What evidence do you have for your theory?

I think that one of your main problems may be that you're thinking of conversation as something it isn't. There is no procedure for success.

You can't create a procedure that maps out every branch in a conversation tree, no. But I think you are underestimating the ritualization and standardization of social activity. There really are patterns in how people do things. There are considerable norms, rules, and constraints. People who are intuitively social (whether they became that way earlier or later in life) may have trouble articulating these patterns.

Within these constraints, there are infinite ways to behave, and you can be as spontaneous as you want. Intuitively social people experience social interaction to be natural and spontaneous because their intuitions keep them within those constraints.

Conversation is "procedureless" in the same sense that musical improvisation is "procedureless." You can't map out the rules for improvisation in advance. But there are some chords that work well (or badly) after others that you can know in advance. You can know whether you are in a major or minor key, and if you have the concept of major/minor mode and key, then it will funnel your spontaneity in a direction that will create a harmonious result.

In contrast, a socially unskilled person is like someone improvising with concepts such as "mode" and "key." Their results are practically guaranteed to violate the constraints of what we consider to be good music. This of what happens when an untrained person plinks away at a piano.

While both conversation and musical improvisation are procedureless, there are procedures for learning those things. Musicians practice scales and etudes. Applying the same kind of process to learning social interaction is looked on as strange, because of the false expectation that people should be able to learn it naturally (even if the reason they haven't is because they were locked out of social interaction for years due to bullying and exclusion that was no fault of their own).

I don't think there is really such a thing as introverted and extroverted people at all. People are encouraged to think of these things as part of their "essential character" (TM) - or even their biology. And in some medical cases, this is obviously true (such as in autism).

Actually, introversation is a component of temperament that does seem to have a biological basis.

But for most people, it's not a lack of ability, it's a lack of will.

I agree that for most people with low social skills probably aren't biologically determined to be quite so bad at socializing. Even though people have different levels of potential due to biology, most people probably don't come anywhere near meeting their potential. But the problem isn't really their will; it's their social development and the associations that they have developed with social interaction.

Someone's present-day social skills are due to an interaction of biological and environmental factors. Temperament on its own generally doesn't determine social skills; instead, their temperament influences social experiences, which determine what level of social skills are learned. In the case of people with low social skills and different temperaments (e.g. introversion), these people generally got that way because their temperament made them "get off on the wrong foot" with their peers socially, often resulting in bullying, exclusion, or abuse. In another peer environment, even an introverted individual could develop social skills just fine.

The idea of an extroverted social animal who feels no fear is a false ideal, I think.

Actually, there are pretty large individual differences in susceptibility to anxiety. People with lower "anxiety threshold" (i.e. it takes less to make them anxious) really do have things harder. I managed to conquer anxiety at the level of social phobia, but to do I had to recognize certain challenges (and advantages) that my temperament gave me, and learned to cope with them.

To be pithy: "If at first you don't succeed, try and try again."

This works for some people once they have certain prerequisites for learning from their attempts at socializing. The trick is to get them to those prerequisites.

Is self-ignorance a prerequisite of human-like sentience?

I present here some ideas I've been considering recently with regards to philosophy of mind, but I suppose the answer to this question would have significant implications for AI research.

Clearly, our instinctive perception of our own sentience/consciousness is one which is inaccurate and mostly ignorant: we do not have knowledge or sensation of the physical processes occurring in our brains which give rise to our sense of self.

Yet I take it as true that our brains - like everything else - are purely physical. No mysticism here, thank you very much. If they are physical, then everything that occurs within is causally deterministic. I avoid here any implications regarding free will (a topic I regard as mostly nonsense anyway). I simply point out that our brain processes will follow a causal narrative thus: input leads to brain state A leads to brain state B which leads to brain state C, and so on. These processes are entirely physical, and therefore, theoretically (not practically - yet), entirely predictable.

Now, ask yourself this question: what would our self-perception be like, if it was entirely accurate to the physical reality? If there was no barrier of ignorance between our consciousness and the inner workings of our brains?

With every idea, though, emotion, plan, memory and action we had, we would be aware of the brainwave that accompanied it - the specific pattern of neuronal firings, and how they built up to create semantically meaningful information. Further, we'd see how this brain state led to the following brain state, and so on. We would perceive ourselves as purely mechanical.

In addition, as our brain is not a single entity, but a massive network of neurons, collected into different systems (or modules), working together but having separate functions, we would not think of our mental processes as unified - at least nowhere near as much as we do now.We would no longer attribute our thoughts and mental life to an "I", but to the totality of mechanical processes that - when we were ignorant - built up to create a unified sense of "I".

I would tentatively suggest that such a sense of self is incompatible with our current sense of self. That how we act and behave and think, how we see ourselves and others, is intrinsically tied to the way we perceive ourselves as non-mechanical, possessing a mystical will - an I - which goes where it chooses (of course academically you may recognise that you're a biological machine, but instinctually we all behave as if we weren't). In short, I would suggest that our ignorance of our neural processes is necessary for the perception of ourselves as autonomous sentient individuals.

The implications of this, were it true, are clear. It would be impossible to create an AI which was both able to perceive and alter its own programming, while maintaining a human-like sentience. That's not to say that such an AI would not be sentient - just that it would be sentient in a very different way to how we are.

Secondly, we would possibly not even be able to recognise this other-sentience, such was the difference. For every decision or proclamation the AI made, we would simply see the mechanical programming at work, and say "It's not intelligent like we are, it's just following mechanical principles". (Think, for example, of Searle's Chinese Room, which I take only shows that if we can fully comprehend every stage of an information manipulation process, most people will intuitively think it to be not sentient). We would think our AI project unfinished, and keep trying to add that "final spark of life", unaware that we had completed the project already.

When considering the initial probability question regarding Linda, it strikes me that it isn't really a choice between a single possibility and two conjoined possibilities.

Giving a person an exclusive choice between "bank teller" OR "bank teller and feminist" will make people imply that "bank teller" means "bank teller and not feminist".

So both choices are conjoined items, it's just that one of them is hidden.

Given this, people may not be so incorrect after all.

Edit: People should probably stop giving this post points, given Sniffnoy's linking of a complete destruction of this objection :)

This seems like something that natural conversationalists already do intuitively. They have a broad range of topic about which they can talk comfortably (either because they are knowledgeable about the specific subjects or because they have enough tools to carry on a conversation even in areas with which they are unfamiliar), and they can steer the conversation around these topics until they find one that their counterpart can also talk comfortably about. Bad conversationalists either aren't comfortable talking about many subjects, are bad at transitioning from one subject to another, or can't sense or don't care when their counterpart doesn't care about a given topic.

The flip side of this is that there are 3 ways of improving one's conversational ability: learning more about more subjects, practicing transitions between various topics, and learning the cues for when one's counterpart is bored or uninterested by the current topic. Kaj focuses on the second of these, but I think the other two strategies ought not be forgotten. It's no use learning to steer the conversation when there are no areas of overlapping interest to steer to, or when you can't recognize whether you are in one or not.