Quotes About Inference

If there's a bag in your car, and a gallon of milk in the bag, there is a gallon of milk in your car. But if there's a person in your car, and a gallon of blood in a person, it would be strange to conclude that there is a gallon of blood in your car.

If p or q is true, and p is false, then q is true." They just wouldn't be part of the word's meaning.

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck. If it's a duck, it's likely to swim, fly, have a back off which water rolls, and contain meat that's tasty when wrapped in a pancake with scallions and hoisin sauce.

Lakoff is right to insist that conceptual metaphors are not just literary garnishes but aides to reason – they are 'metaphors we live by.' And metaphors can power sophisticated inferences, not just obvious ones…

Mathematics is the extension of common sense by other means.

In the Bayesian framework, how much you believe something after you see the evidence depends not just on what the evidence shows, but on how much you believed it to begin with.

If you've ever run an experiment, you know scientific truth doesn't pop out of the clouds blowing a flaming trumpet at you. Data is messy, and inference is hard.

When you're trying to draw reliable inferences from improbable events, wiggle room is the enemy.

Inference is a hard thing, maybe the hardest thing. From the shape of the clouds and the way they move we struggle to go backward, to solve for x, the system that made them.

One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture

Contrary to all prior belief, the vast continent of arithmetical truth cannot be brought into systematic order by laying down for once and for all a fixed set of axioms and rules of inference from which every true arithmetical statement can be formally derived.

The ideal reasoner, he remarked, would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also all the results which would follow from it.

It is necessary to know how to slip the all-important matter, rather hinted at than said right out, in between the description of two fashionable entertainments, without appearing to intend it. It is necessary to imply a thing by judicious reservations; let what is desired be guessed at; contradict in such a fashion as to confirm, or affirm in such a way that no one shall believe the statement

When it comes to horror, I always prefer the nebulous & the implied to the physical & the described.

Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar.

Finding a mechanism does not bypass the problem of induction.

Presumption means nothing more than as stated by Lord Mansfield, the weighing of probabilities, and deciding, by the powers of common sense, on which side the truth is.

I usually like to interact with people who don't speak until it's necessary but I was intimidated by Carl's physique. I didn't feel inferior so much as incompatible. Carl existed on a plane where success was measured by physical feats. He had a brain because his body needed it, rather than the opposite. I didn't understand such people. I didn't know what they wanted, or might do.

Hegel thought that, if enough was known about a thing to distinguish it from all other things, then all its properties could be inferred by logic. This was a mistake, and from this mistake arose the whole imposing edifice of his system. This illustrates an important truth, namely, that the worse your logic, the more interesting the consequences to which it gives rise.

to justify any such inference.

we can only infer it, and can never be directly and immediately aware of it.

Hegel thought that, if enough was known about a thing to distinguish it from all other things, then all its properties could be inferred by logic. This was a mistake, and from this mistake arose the whole edifice of his system. This illustrates an important truth, namely, that the worse your logic, the more interesting the consequences.

Any theory on the principles of mathematics must always be inductive i.e. it must lie in the fact that the theory in question enables us to deduce ordinary mathematics.

To assume is to presume.