Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by spxtr 1046 days ago
ET Jaynes has a book "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science". It's a nice book, and I was wondering if you had any thoughts on it.
1 comments

I haven't read the book. What does it say?

On the matter of probability and science, I like how Karl Popper put it, although I can't find the text now so I must report it from memory. His point was that scientific hypothesis formation is an instance of inductive generalisation while probabilistic inference is a form of abductive reasoning, and so using probability to support an inductively derived hypothesis is basically supporting a guess, with another guess.

Statistics of course is not the same as probability. Personally I think statistics is a bunch of hooey.