Lars P. Syll

The vain search​ for The Holy Grail of Science Traditionally, philosophers have focused mostly on the logical template of inference. The paradigm-case has been deductive inference, which is topic-neutral and context-insensitive. The study of deductive rules has engendered the search for the Holy Grail: syntactic and topic-neutral accounts of all prima facie reasonable inferential rules. The search has hoped to find rules that are transparent and...

Mobileländet i svenska skolor Efter att ha varit ute och besökt en rad skolor under några veckors tid kan yours truly inte låta bli att fundera över saker man skulle vilja ändra och förbättra. Och en och annan undran kan man ju också kosta på sig. Som t ex varför vi i vårt land inte följt det franska beslutet att totalförbjuda mobiltelefoner i skolan. Och nej, jag VET att mobilförbud inte löser skolans alla problem. Ingen vettig människa har någonsin sagt...

Bayesian moons made of green cheese In other words, if a decision-maker thinks something cannot be true and interprets this to mean it has zero probability, he will never be influenced by any data, which is surely absurd. So leave a little probability for the moon being made of green cheese; it can be as small as 1 in a million, but have it there since otherwise an army of astronauts returning with samples of the said cheese will leave you unmoved. To get...

The quest​ for certainty — a new substitute for religion In this post-rationalist age of ours, more and more books are written in symbolic languages, and it becomes more and more difficult to see why: what it is all about, and why it should be necessary, or advantageous, to allow oneself to be bored by volumes of symbolic trivialities. It almost seems as if the symbolism were becoming a value in itself, to be revered for its sublime ‘exactness’: a new...

Machine learning — puzzling Big Data nonsense If we wanted highly probable claims, scientists would stick to​​ low-level observables and not seek generalizations, much less theories with high explanatory content. In this day​ of fascination with Big data’s ability to predict​ what book I’ll buy next, a healthy Popperian reminder is due: humans also want to understand and to explain. We want bold ‘improbable’ theories. I’m a little puzzled when I hear...

Understanding government debts and deficits [embedded content] The balanced budget paradox is probably one of the most devastating phenomena haunting our modern economies. The harder politicians — usually on the advice of establishment economists — try to achieve balanced budgets for the public sector, the less likely they are to succeed in their endeavour. And the more the citizens have to pay for the concomitant austerity policies these wrong-headed...

Bayesian ‘old evidence’ problems Why is the subjective Bayesian supposed to have an old evidence problem? The allegation … goes like this: If probability is a measure of degree of belief, then if an agent already knows that e has occurred, the agent must assign P(e) the value 1. Hence P(e|H) is assigned a value of 1. But this means no Bayesian support accrues from e. For if P(e) = P(e|H) = 1, then P(H|e) = P(H). The Bayesian condition for support is not met...

Den tysta majoriteten gör rent hus  [embedded content] Till alla kvinnliga studenter som under årens lopp fått stå ut med att professorn kallat dem för Marie-Fifi …

But once, we were here  [embedded content] In loving memory of my brother, Peter ‘Uncas’ Pålsson.

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