How, precisely, does one formalize the concept of “the bucket of pebbles represents the number of sheep, but it is doing so inaccurately.” ie, that it’s a model of the number of sheep rather than about something else, but a bad/inaccurate model?
I’ve fiddled around a bit with that, and I find myself passing a recursive buck when I try to precisely reduce that one.
The best I can come up with is something like “I have correct models in my head for the bucket, pebbles, sheep, etc, individually except that I also have some causal paths linking them that don’t match the links that exist in reality.”
See this thread for a discussion. A less buck-passing model is: “This bucket represents the sheep … plus an error term resulting from this here specific error process.”
For instance, if I systematically count two sheep exiting together as one sheep, then the bucket represents the number of sheep minus the number of sheep-pairs erroneously detected as one sheep. It’s not enough to say the sheep-detector is buggy; to have an accurate model of what it does (and thus, what its representations mean) you need to know what the bug is.
How, precisely, does one formalize the concept of “the bucket of pebbles represents the number of sheep, but it is doing so inaccurately.” ie, that it’s a model of the number of sheep rather than about something else, but a bad/inaccurate model?
I’ve fiddled around a bit with that, and I find myself passing a recursive buck when I try to precisely reduce that one.
The best I can come up with is something like “I have correct models in my head for the bucket, pebbles, sheep, etc, individually except that I also have some causal paths linking them that don’t match the links that exist in reality.”
See this thread for a discussion. A less buck-passing model is: “This bucket represents the sheep … plus an error term resulting from this here specific error process.”
For instance, if I systematically count two sheep exiting together as one sheep, then the bucket represents the number of sheep minus the number of sheep-pairs erroneously detected as one sheep. It’s not enough to say the sheep-detector is buggy; to have an accurate model of what it does (and thus, what its representations mean) you need to know what the bug is.