Re:Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning
by RussianBot9580 on Saturday November 07, 2026 @10:20PM
(#50410151)
> Writing a Superman story does not mean the language and pictures represent physics
You can write many imagined stories, but one of them will match observed reality. It won't be about an airborne male model who wears his underpants on the outside. But you can write a story that describes reality. And you can describe observable phenomena with statistics. Of course, you can describe plenty of pseudoscientific drivel with statistics too.
Re:Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning
by theptip on Saturday November 07, 2026 @11:54PM
(#50410512)
The key point is quite simple: You can write any retroactive explanation you want. But only some stories are _predictive_. And you can weigh models by how good their predictions are; which was my original point above.
Math is not physics and physics is not math. Writing a Superman story does not mean the language and pictures represent physics
That's the difference being highlighted here; stats are not evidence of gravity and electromagnetism; physical phenomena when materials influenced by those forces are relative to local gravity, electromagnetic fields are our evidence
Stats of 1960s demographics did not capture immutable physical phenomena because entropy-> generational churn -> those people are now dead
The languages do not matter; they're just to communicate some ground truth.
Shackling society to the past through careful statistical methods relative to finance and politics to avoid societal change is not a scientific conclusion; there's no reason to use 30-40 years ago as the center of our social universe
The concern with stats consumption is we walk away from a result as if its an immutable forever conclusion as we ignore that gravity and electromagnetism, etc have not stopped changing ground truth; past truths that no longer matter to our next choices