andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-1857 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Several months ago, Mike Betancourt and I wrote a discussion for the article, Can quantum probability provide a new direction for cognitive modeling?, by Emmanuel Pothos and Jerome Busemeyer, in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. We didn’t say much, but it was a milestone for me because, with this article, BBS became the 100th journal I’d published in. Anyway, the full article with its 34 discussions just appeared in the journal . Here it is. What surprised me, in reading the full discussion, was how supportive the commentary was. Given the topic of Pothos and Busemeyer’s article, I was expecting the discussions to range from gentle mockery to outright abuse. The discussion that Mike and I wrote was moderately encouraging, and I was expecting this to fall on the extreme positive end of the spectrum. Actually, though, most of the discussions were positive, and only a couple were purely negative (those would be “Quantum models of cognition as Orwellian newspeak” by Michael Lee a
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1 Several months ago, Mike Betancourt and I wrote a discussion for the article, Can quantum probability provide a new direction for cognitive modeling? [sent-1, score-0.718]
2 We didn’t say much, but it was a milestone for me because, with this article, BBS became the 100th journal I’d published in. [sent-3, score-0.307]
3 Anyway, the full article with its 34 discussions just appeared in the journal . [sent-4, score-0.577]
4 What surprised me, in reading the full discussion, was how supportive the commentary was. [sent-6, score-0.316]
5 Given the topic of Pothos and Busemeyer’s article, I was expecting the discussions to range from gentle mockery to outright abuse. [sent-7, score-0.737]
6 The discussion that Mike and I wrote was moderately encouraging, and I was expecting this to fall on the extreme positive end of the spectrum. [sent-8, score-0.721]
7 We expressed some vague skepticism but it’s hard for me to be really negative about the idea, given that classical probability theory is not actually correct, and we do indeed live in a quantum world (otherwise all our tables and chairs would fall apart, for one thing). [sent-10, score-1.188]
8 I certainly see no logical reason why our models of probability and uncertainty should be restricted to the “Boltzmannian” simplification. [sent-11, score-0.39]
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Introduction: Several months ago, Mike Betancourt and I wrote a discussion for the article, Can quantum probability provide a new direction for cognitive modeling?, by Emmanuel Pothos and Jerome Busemeyer, in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. We didn’t say much, but it was a milestone for me because, with this article, BBS became the 100th journal I’d published in. Anyway, the full article with its 34 discussions just appeared in the journal . Here it is. What surprised me, in reading the full discussion, was how supportive the commentary was. Given the topic of Pothos and Busemeyer’s article, I was expecting the discussions to range from gentle mockery to outright abuse. The discussion that Mike and I wrote was moderately encouraging, and I was expecting this to fall on the extreme positive end of the spectrum. Actually, though, most of the discussions were positive, and only a couple were purely negative (those would be “Quantum models of cognition as Orwellian newspeak” by Michael Lee a
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Introduction: I read this article by Rivka Galchen on quantum computing. Much of the article was about an eccentric scientist in his fifties named David Deutch. I’m sure the guy is brilliant but I wasn’t particularly interested in his not particularly interesting life story (apparently he’s thin and lives in Oxford). There was a brief description of quantum computing itself, which reminds me of the discussion we had a couple years ago under the heading, The laws of conditional probability are false (and the update here ). I don’t have anything new to say here; I’d just never heard of quantum computing before and it seemed relevant to our discussion. The uncertainty inherent in quantum computing seems closely related to Jouni’s idea of fully Bayesian computing , that uncertainty should be inherent in the computational structure rather than tacked on at the end. P.S. No, I’m not working on July 4th! This post is two months old, we just have a long waiting list of blog entries.
Introduction: James Robins, Tyler VanderWeele, and Richard Gill write : Neyman introduced a formal mathematical theory of counterfactual causation that now has become standard language in many quantitative disciplines, but not in physics. We use results on causal interaction and interference between treatments (derived under the Neyman theory) to give a simple new proof of a well-known result in quantum physics, namely, Bellís inequality. Now the predictions of quantum mechanics and the results of experiment both violate Bell’s inequality. In the remainder of the talk, we review the implications for a counterfactual theory of causation. Assuming with Einstein that faster than light (supraluminal) communication is not possible, one can view the Neyman theory of counterfactuals as falsified by experiment. . . . Is it safe for a quantitative discipline to rely on a counterfactual approach to causation, when our best confirmed physical theory falsifies their existence? I haven’t seen the talk
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Introduction: As we’ve discussed on occasion, conditional probability (“Boltzmann statistics,” in physics jargon) is false at the atomic level. (It’s false at the macroscopic level too, but with discrepancies too small to be detected directly most of the time.) Occasionally I’ve speculated on how quantum probability (that is, the laws of uncertainty that hold in the real world) might be applied to social science research. I’ve made no progress but remain intrigued by the idea. Chris Zorn told me he recently went to a meeting on applications of non-Kolmogorovian / quantum probability to social & human phenomena. Here’s his paper (with Charles Smith), “Some Quantum-Like Features of Mass Politics in Two-Party Systems,” which begins: We [Smith and Zorn] expand the substantive terrain of QI’s reach by illuminating a body of political theory that to date has been elaborated in strictly classical language and formalisms but has complex features that seem to merit generalizations of the prob
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Introduction: Several months ago, Mike Betancourt and I wrote a discussion for the article, Can quantum probability provide a new direction for cognitive modeling?, by Emmanuel Pothos and Jerome Busemeyer, in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. We didn’t say much, but it was a milestone for me because, with this article, BBS became the 100th journal I’d published in. Anyway, the full article with its 34 discussions just appeared in the journal . Here it is. What surprised me, in reading the full discussion, was how supportive the commentary was. Given the topic of Pothos and Busemeyer’s article, I was expecting the discussions to range from gentle mockery to outright abuse. The discussion that Mike and I wrote was moderately encouraging, and I was expecting this to fall on the extreme positive end of the spectrum. Actually, though, most of the discussions were positive, and only a couple were purely negative (those would be “Quantum models of cognition as Orwellian newspeak” by Michael Lee a
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Introduction: Several months ago, Mike Betancourt and I wrote a discussion for the article, Can quantum probability provide a new direction for cognitive modeling?, by Emmanuel Pothos and Jerome Busemeyer, in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. We didn’t say much, but it was a milestone for me because, with this article, BBS became the 100th journal I’d published in. Anyway, the full article with its 34 discussions just appeared in the journal . Here it is. What surprised me, in reading the full discussion, was how supportive the commentary was. Given the topic of Pothos and Busemeyer’s article, I was expecting the discussions to range from gentle mockery to outright abuse. The discussion that Mike and I wrote was moderately encouraging, and I was expecting this to fall on the extreme positive end of the spectrum. Actually, though, most of the discussions were positive, and only a couple were purely negative (those would be “Quantum models of cognition as Orwellian newspeak” by Michael Lee a
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Introduction: The anonymous commenter puts it well : The problem is simple, the researchers are disproving always false null hypotheses and taking this disproof as near proof that their theory is correct.
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