Sublime

The Protagorean position, rightly interpreted, does not involve the view that I never make mistakes, but only that the evidence of my mistakes must appear to me. My past self can be judged just as another person can be judged. But all this presupposes that, as regards inferences as opposed to percepts, there is some impersonal standard of correctne

In the Bayesian worldview, prediction is the yardstick by which we measure progress. We can perhaps never know the truth with 100 percent certainty, but making correct predictions is the way to tell if we’re getting closer.

We know now that the future is inherently unpredictable because not all variables can be known and even the smallest error imaginable in our data very quickly throws off our predictions. The best we can do is estimate the future by generating realistic, useful probabilities.

as the statistician George Box memorably put it, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”

we can rely on an inductive argument only if we have good reason to think that the premises include all the evidence relevant to the question of whether the conclusion is true.

Pour lui, tous les systèmes sociaux sont imparfaits, et la politique n’est pas la lutte entre le bien et le mal, mais le choix entre le préférable et le détestable. Ce qui ne signifie pas la volonté d’exclure toute morale de la politique, mais plutôt la reconnaissance de la spécificité de la politique et la nécessité de ne pas lui appliquer les cat