HSW – about induction

I have long been a critic of induction.  The trouble with the word “induction” is that it is used in many different ways.  As part of my continuing series on how science works, I want to explain here what I am criticizing, and what I am not criticizing.

Baconian induction

Sir Francis Bacon suggested used the term “induction” in his recommendations on investigating the natural world.  As described by Wikipedia, his method called for:

procedures for isolating and further investigating the form nature, or cause, of a phenomenon, including the method of agreement, method of difference, and method of concomitant variation.

The rationality of voting

There are a couple of posts at the Becker-Posner blog about voting, and about the reasons that people vote:

• Gary Becker: Why People Vote and What That Implies-Becker
• Richard Posner: The Paradox of Voting–Posner

Becker expresses the question with

This raises the very old question of why people vote in large elections when their chances of being a pivotal voter are virtually zero, and when voting takes time and is often inconvenient. The electorate is surely conscious of the cost to them of voting since, for example, turnout is usually much smaller when the weather is very bad. The common answer nowadays about this so-called paradox of voting is not that voters are irrational, but rather that they vote for reasons other than to influence outcomes. They may vote to indicate their moral support for particular candidates, or because they believe they express a precious right when they vote, or for other non-instrumental reasons.

In turn, Posner expresses his curiosity with:

The paradox of voting in national elections is that, since a single vote is almost certain to have no effect on the outcome (in a Presidential election, it will merely add one digit to an eight-figure number), there seems to be no benefit from voting. The cost is small enough (if it’s high for a person, he is unlikely to vote), but it’s positive, so that if the benefit of voting is zero the voter is being irrational. Yet, as Becker points out, more than 100 million people bothered to vote in the recent Presidential election.

Answering V.J. Torley’s questions

Over at the Uncommon Descent blog, poster vjtorley has posed “Ten Questions for Professor Coyne.”  I am not a spokesman for Jerry Coyne, and I disagree with some of what he writes.  But I thought I would try giving my own answers to those questions.  I’m pretty sure that Jerry Coyne would disagree with me on some of the answers.

Question 1 – Is science the only road to knowledge?

I’ll note that there is some ambiguity on what is meant by “knowledge.”  For myself, I would never claim that science is the only way to all knowledge, though it is an excellent way to knowledge about the natural world.  In any case, vjtorley breaks this question into several parts.

Random confusion

In a recent post “Coordinated Complexity — the key to refuting postdiction and single target objections” at the Uncommon Descent blog, scordova attempts to address some of the objections to the probabilistic arguments used by ID proponents.  He gives an example of the kind of objection that he will address:

The opponents of ID argue something along the lines: “take a deck of cards, randomly shuffle it, the probability of any given sequence occurring is 1 out of 52 factorial or about 8×10^67 — Improbable things happen all the time, it doesn’t imply intelligent design.”

Unfortunately, that post at UD fails to answer the criticism and only further illustrates the confusion that it so common in ID thinking.