XPost: comp.ai.nat-lang   
   From: mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de   
      
   On Thu, 17 Apr 2008 13:35:50 GMT, Ted Dunning wrote:   
      
   > The upshot is that even if you are a frequentist in your heart of   
   > hearts, it will still pay to behave as if you were a Bayesian.  And I,   
   > as a Bayesian, will be able to behave as if you were rational because   
   > I will not know your secret.   
      
   I am neither, for I am a humble follower of the axiomatic approach to   
   probability. I believe that any attempt to explain probability is   
   fundamentally flawed, because it should require a kind of hyper   
   computation.   
      
   > So let's just call it a probability and be done with.  You can keep   
   > your secret and I won't tell anybody.   
      
   Except that you need some incomputable process behind it. But the document   
   is here (as a *finite* set of pixels). OCR is deterministic. Basically,   
   there is no any process, no infinity involved. The only possibility were to   
   consider human perception of the document. But, though a human would give   
   uncertain answers about the document, these answers would not vary.   
      
   Of course, we could take individuals at random from some sample set, asking   
   them to analyse the document. That would be indeed random. But this   
   randomness would be neither in the document, nor in human perception. My   
   favorite example of this sort of manipulation is Pi. Let us take a sample   
   of people and ask them to write down some decimal figures of Pi. Would it   
   make Pi random?   
      
   --   
   Regards,   
   Dmitry A. Kazakov   
   http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de   
      
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