Because human population grew from several million at the end of the Ice Age to 6 billion now, more favored new genes have emerged and evolution has speeded up, both globally and among continental groups of people, Harpending says. See Carson Chow for a nice discussion of how Bayesian inference is more like human reasoning than formal logic. Jaynes in his iconic book Probability Theory: The Logic of Science, is plausible reasoning. This also implies that reasoning logically is something that must be learned and practiced. I think this strongly implies that the brain is doing Bayesian inference. While I think the brain is doing something like Bayesian inference (perhaps with some kind of heuristic shortcuts), there are probably laboratory experiments showing that we make a lot of mistakes and often do not properly apply Bayes’ theorem. In fact, our paleolithic ancestors, much like all of our ancestors before the invention of the automobile, mostly walked everywhere.

If you are unsuccessful in your application, it’s best to readjust the thinking with your invention to see if it’s marketable for a different purpose and then apply again to the Patents and Trademarks Office. AC current can be transmitted for very long distances at very high voltages and then stepped down by voltage transformers at or near its final destination. If a linguist said yesterday ‘no intelligible sequence of English sentences has property P’, the and the sequence or sentence which the story teller writes down today has property P, then then the linguist’s claim yesterday was false. When a writer writes a story, they are putting down a sequences of sentences which already exists as an abstract object. The domain of potential counterexamples to linguistics claims today, already contains all sequences of English sentences which literary ingenuity could ever devise. Because we, humans, cannot fly using our own power, we have been attracted towards the idea of flight for some two millenniums.

I think it is important to know when you draw a conclusion, whether you are using deductive logic or if you are depending on some prior. The problem is that depending on your priors you can deduce different things. This explains why two perfectly intelligent people can easily come to different conclusions. Yet in Sweden and Denmark, the gene that makes the milk-digesting enzyme lactase remains active, so “almost everyone can drink fresh milk,” explaining why dairying is more common in Europe than in the Mediterranean and Africa, Harpending says. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy was much more than a prognosis of capitalism’s future. These innovations, he argued, take just as much skill and daring as does the process of invention. All players use the basic human tech tree when they begin training the skill. In fact, more likely we mostly use weak syllogisms and that interferes with formal logic. Here are the first three chapters of his book Probability Theory: the Logic of Science.

Jaynes showed that weak syllogisms as well as formal logic arise naturally from Bayesian inference. In the Jaynes view, probabilities measure a degree of plausibility. But Oppenheimer’s mystical adherence to the logically incomplete Copenhagen interpretation (Everett’s “philosophic monstrosity”) led Jaynes to switch advisors, becoming a student of Wigner. Jaynes started as an Oppenheimer student, following his advisor from Berkeley to Princeton. I recommend this article on probability, maximum entropy and Bayesian thinking, and this, which includes his recollections of Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger and Oppenheimer. Clearly, the great Silicon Valley innovation machine hasn’t been creating many jobs of late — unless you are counting Asia, where American technology companies have been adding jobs like mad for years. So e.g. Columbus discovered America (because it already existed and he went to visit it) whereas Bell invented the telephone, by physically creating the first prototype. For, paradigmatic cases of invention typically do involve creating a new physical object, while paradigmatic cases of discovery involves visiting an already existing physical object.