{"id":178,"date":"2004-11-23T03:51:40","date_gmt":"2004-11-23T08:51:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/server97.snhdns.com\/~ravik\/wp\/?p=178"},"modified":"2004-11-23T03:51:40","modified_gmt":"2004-11-23T08:51:40","slug":"induction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/classic\/200411\/induction\/","title":{"rendered":"Induction"},"content":{"rendered":"

A previous post<\/a> generated many doubts about random sampling, adequate sampling, and induction.<\/p>\n

This post, as you might have induced<\/i> by now, is about induction.
\n
\nThe word induction has many senses – the closest to what I mean here is logical induction: The process of deriving general principles from particular facts or instances.<\/i>
\nNow, the important thing to note here is that the induced general principle or hypothesis, might not be deducable<\/i>.<\/p>\n

And this inducing, while seemingly less rational, is far more complicated. An example should put things in perspective –
\nSay you are teaching your child to recognize a cat.
\nYou point to a cat and tell your child that it’s a cat.
\nYour child nods, even shakes its rattle.<\/p>\n

You point to a pomenarian (a small furry dog), and ask your child what it is.
\n“Cat” comes the answer. But you correct it. It’s a dog you say.<\/p>\n

After a couple more cats and dogs, your child now can recognize a cat. And a dog.<\/p>\n

Now, this is human intelligence<\/i> at work. And what is involved is Induction. Which in this case is far superior to deduction! For poor Artificial Intelligence researchers cannot make even a super-computer distinguish a cat and dog with just a few examples.
\nAnd a super-computer is a far superior deducer than a baby.<\/p>\n

When the baby sees you point to the cat, it sees so many things – how does it know what pertains to “catness”? It sees your right hand pointing towards the animal, it sees the animal on a rug, it sees gazillion features of the animal – fur,
\nsize, yada.<\/p>\n

With these potentially infinite features, a logical deducer should have potentially infinite random samples!! Unfortunately (or fortunately, I hate cats) there
\naren’t infinite cats available for your baby’s perusal.
\nSo, the baby induces<\/i> a general hypothesis of “catness” from specific
\nexamples.<\/p>\n

Most of our ideas, our thoughts are inductions – forming stereotypes from specific examples and instances. Thus, the next time somebody tells you that stereotyping is bad, and that only vanilla logical deduction\/reason is kosher, you can have a smug chuckle for you’ve induced<\/s> deduced that he knows little about induction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A previous post generated many doubts about random sampling, adequate sampling, and induction. This post, as you might have induced by now, is about induction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}