A spray that will improve your memory

Futurescanner is a website full of forecasts. (I heard about this from an unsolicited email but it looks interesting.) It would be fun (at least for me) to see forecasts about statistical methods. The challenge would be in stating the problems clearly enough you could unambiguously state when they were solved.

1 thought on “A spray that will improve your memory

  1. As I read the pieces by Fodor, his intention is to get rid of the idea that we can use at all or even understand (he repeatedly stresses he is not interested in epistemology) the mechanisms at work in selection. That surviving species have had the ability to do that is not surprising but why and how it happened is beyond us. The idea that we can explain the reason for biological or even psychological traits we think are typical of present day homo sapiens (like Talebans, Australian aborigines or Donald Rumsfeld) by studying how life went on millions of years ago is defensive and impossible to disprove. It is likely that the attractiveness of the idea among the dominating conservatives reflects its ability to prevent us from asking questions about the reasons for present day problems or political agendas. Since people are, just like that.

    At the same time, however, I wonder why the paper of Gould to which Fodor refers is so old and bleak. In a later book (Full House, from 1996) Gould argues, quite strongly against the overall interpretation of evolution as having a direction at all. If Fodor´s political intentions were as you suggest, he might have used this more recent version of Gould´s iconoclastics with greater power than the one speculating about how traits can haphazardly follow those "apparently" being selected for. Gould´s analysis that development towards greater complexity or bigger forms are explained by random development away from a left wall of minimal size or complexity, while, as he stresses the population mode is invariantly then and now bacterial, could be appealing. Especially on a statistical blog.

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