Wednesday, January 7, 2009

dBlackSwan-60 !

So it seems that we are endowed with specific and elaborate inductive instincts showing us the way. Contrary to the opinion held by the great David Hume, and that of the British empiricist tradition, that belief arises from custom, as they assumed that we learn generalizations solely from experience and empirical observations, it was shown from studies of infant behavior that we come equipped with mental machinery that causes us to selectively generalize from experiences (i.e., to selectively acquire inductive learning in some domains but remain skeptical in others). By doing so, we are not learning from a mere thousand days, but benefiting, thanks to evolution, from the learning of our ancestors—which found its way into our biology.

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