Edwin Thompson Jaynes

thumb|right|Jaynes (circa 1960) Edwin Thompson Jaynes (July 5, 1922 – April 30, 1998) was a physicist and statistician, and author of Probability Theory: The Logic of Science. Quotes Probability Theory: The Logic of Science (2003) In principle, the only operations which a machine cannot perform for us are those which we cannot describe in detail, or which could not be completed in a finite number of steps. Pg. 7. Common language — or, at least, the English language — has an almost universal tendency to disguise epistemological statements by putting them into a grammatical form which suggests to the unwary an ontological statement. A major source of error in current probability theory arises from an unthinking failure to perceive this. To interpret the first kind of statement in the ontological sense is to assert that one’s own private thoughts and sensations are realities existing externally in Nature. We call this the ‘mind projection fallacy’, and note the trouble it causes many times in what follows. But this trouble is hardly confined to probability theory; as soon as it is pointed out, it becomes evident that much of the discourse of philosophers and Gestalt psychologists, and the attempts of physicists to explain quantum theory, are reduced to nonsense by the author falling repeatedly into the mind projection fallacy. Pg. 22. The semiliterate on the next bar stool will tell you with absolute, arrogant assurance just how to solve the world's problems; while the scholar who has spent a lifetime studying their causes is not at all sure how to do this. It appears to be a quite general principle that, whenever there is a randomized way of doing something, then there is a nonrandomized way that delivers better performance but requires more thought. Let the things which exasperate us in Halley's work be a lesson for us today. The First Commandment of scientific data analysis publication ought to be: 'Thou shalt reveal thy full original data, unmutilated by any processing whatsoever.' Just as today we could do far more with Halley's raw data than he did, future readers may be able to do more with our raw data than we can, if only we will refrain from mutilating it according to our present purposes and prejudices. At the very least, they will approach our data with a different state of prior knowledge than ours, and we have seen how much this can affect the conclusions. Pg. 319. External links Category:Physicists from the United States Category:Statisticians Category:1998 deaths Category:People from Iowa Category:Cornell University alumni Category:Princeton University alumni Category:Agnostics from the United States