In lieu of my actually having something to say, here are a few announcements about things happening hereabouts. If you’re not interested in philosophical and/or musical events around Boston and Providence, skip over this post.
Tomorrow there are a couple of interesting papers being presented.
At Brown, “Thomas Griffiths”:http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~gruffydd/ (Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT) is doing a talk __Causes and Coincidences__. It’s in Metcalf Research 129 at 4pm. Here’s the abstract.
bq. The ability to infer causal relationships is central to the growth of both scientific and everyday knowledge. Traditional explanations of causal cognition have tended to emphasize either domain-general covariation-based learning, or domain-specific knowledge about causal mechanisms. I will present a unified account of three phenomena of causal induction – inferring causal relationships from contingency data, using physical theories to guide the identification of hidden causes, and making discoveries from suspicious coincidences – that explains these inferences as the result of domain-general statistical learning informed by mechanism knowledge tailored to the system at hand. In this account, the computational problem of causal induction is formulated as a Bayesian decision among a set of hypotheses generated by a simple causal theory. This analysis of causal induction illustrates how probabilistic models can be used to combine statistical learning with symbolic structure-a combination that is broadly applicable in cognitive science.
At MIT, Elisabeth Lloyd (History and Philosophy of Science, Indiana) is presenting “How Should We Understand Bias in Scientific Explanations?”:http://web.mit.edu/philos/www/lloyd.pdf. That’s at 3.30pm, room “56-114”:http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg?selection=56&Buildings=go.
On more mundane matters, I’m moderately excited about the lineup of bands coming through Boston the next few weeks:
bq. March 8 – Paul Kelly
March 29 – Pretty Girls Make Graves
April 10 – Death Cab for Cuite
April 22 – The Waifs
April 24 – Mason Jennings
I’d be more excited if all those acts were playing in Providence, but Boston might be close enough in most cases. I like Mason Jenning’s “taping policy”:http://www.masonjennings.com/html/framesets/shows.html. I might have to buy a recorder for the iPod for that show!