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Topic: Principle of indifference

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	Principle of indifference - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		The principle of indifference is a rule for assigning epistemic probabilities.
		The principle of indifference is meaningless under the frequency interpretation of probability, in which probabilities are relative frequencies rather than degrees of belief in uncertain propositions, conditional upon a state of information.
		The "Principle of insufficient reason" was renamed the "Principle of Indifference" by the economist John Maynard Keynes, who was careful to note that it applies only when there is no knowledge indicating unequal probabilities.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Principle_of_indifference (1563 words)

	4Reference \|\| Principle of indifference (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		The Principle of indifference is a rule for assigning epistemic probabilities amongst n mutually exclusive possibilities, where n is a positive integer.
		Another example of the use of the principle of indifference can be found in the derivation of the partition function.
		The Principle of insufficient reason was its first name, given to it by later writers, possibly as a play on Gottfried Leibniz's Principle of Sufficient Reason.
	www.4reference.net /encyclopedias/wikipedia/Principle_of_indifference.html (779 words)

	principle of indifference (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		The principle of indifference is normally misused by being applied to dependent events.
		Therefore, we apply the principle of indifference, giving the existence of life a probability of 1/2.
		The principle of indifference is often misapplied to continuous variables of non-uniform distribution.
	www.yourencyclopedia.net /Principle_of_indifference.html (1845 words)

	[No title]
		The norm of neutrality is a ground-world norm; the principle of neutrality a ground-world principle.
		The principles of the DNI are non-metadoctrinal, that is, doctrinal as opposed to metadoctrinal.
		The doctrine of neutral-inclusivity is a normative doctrine, and the principle of personhood a normative principle.
	www.xs4all.nl /~in/En/MNI/BoF4-6.txt (21426 words)

	GENETIC EVIDENCE IN PATERNITY CASES - DNA
		The central issue is the common error called the "principle of indifference" may cause any genetic testing using Bayes formula to be misleading and unreliable.
		The drastic change in probabilities that occur with a change in prior (pre-test) probability highlights a serious error in statistical methodology known as the "principle of indifference."3 The principle of indifference is the error of assuming equality when the actual probability of paternity is not known.
		It is well known by statisticians that the principle of indifference is a serious methodological error.
	www.fa-ir.org /alabama/cs/cs_dna.htm (1447 words)

	CSC - The Fine-Tuning Design Argument:
		The principle of indifference, therefore, tells us that the probability of its hitting the bulls eye is the same as the probability of hitting any other part of the dart board of equal area.
		The reason is that, based on the principle of indifference, we can still say that it is very improbable for the values for the parameters of physics to have fallen in the life-permitting range instead of some other part of the "illuminated" range.
		In the last section we used the principle of indifference to rigorously justify the claim that the fine-tuning is highly improbable under the atheistic single-universe hypothesis.
	www.discovery.org /scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=91 (9907 words)

	BOOK OF FUNDAMENTALS: TRUTH AND NEUTRALITY IN EXPECTATIONS
		Taken literally, the formulation of the end to be pursued in terms of 'maximum utility' is extremist and inconsistent with the neutralist character of the principle of indifference.
		And if this principle were wrong, it would not benefit neutrality in the end, if we tried to achieve a neutral or nanapolar goal by assigning equal probabilities to the possibilities in question (assuming that they are completely unknown to the decision maker).
		Since the principle of indifference applies to situations of 'complete uncertainty' and the principle of truth to situations of 'complete certainty', there is a wide range of situations between these two epistemological extremes.
	www.trinp.org /MNI/BoF/4/3/2.HTM (1559 words)

	Fr. Hardon Archives - All My Liberty - Chapter 1: Principle and Foundation of the Spiritual Life
		In proportion as a man frees himself from their tyranny, he enjoys indifference or liberty to follow that which his mind, enlightened by revelation, tells him is most conducive to the end for which he was created.
		Consequently, “to make ourselves indifferent” means the cultivation of both intellect and will: of the intellect to have it see with conviction the destiny to which man has been called and the necessary means to be taken to arrive there; and of the will to deliver it from domination by its impulses.
		For although indifference belongs primarily to the will, it also includes the perfection of the mind which clearly perceives what is objectively good or evil on the road to salvation and so presents its vision to the emancipated will for acceptance or rejection.
	www.therealpresence.org /archives/Christian_Spirituality/Christian_Spirituality_019.htm (2541 words)

	Principle of indifference (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		In layman's terms, the principle of indifference states that, if we have a list of several independent events and have no reason to believe that any are more or less likely to occur than others, then we should assume that each has an equal chance of occurring.
		If the principle of indifference is applied to a coin with three possible outcomes, the probability of each outcome is then 1/3.
		The principle of indifference is often used as part of a faulty argument about ranges of values.
	www.portaljuice.com /principle_of_indifference.html (1753 words)

	PES Yearbook: 1998: Thomas F. Green, Spiritual Values and Public Languages (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		The curricular principles I call the principle of indifference and the principle of concern.
		The principle of indifference states that we are allowed to teach anything in the public schools if it is widely agreed that nothing serious is at stake in doing so.
		We are far from indifferent toward teaching about Jehovah and Allah, however, and so it is mandated that we either include such instruction or banish the matter altogether from the public schools.
	www.ed.uiuc.edu /eps/pes-yearbook/1998/green.html (1587 words)

	wo's weblog: Indifference (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		Another remaining problem, I think, is that the principle is incompatible with the Principal Principle relating chance and credence: if my evidence settles all questions except the outcome of a certain random process, and I know that the odds for outcome A are 0.9, I should not assign equal credence to all possible outcomes.
		Then the principle says you should assign equal credence to the possibilitiy that you are the one and the possibility that you are the other.
		Look at it in terms of confirmation theory: the unrestricted principle says that all theories compatible with the available evidence should be assigned equal credence: creationism is just as good as evolution theory and as Russell's 'theory' according to which the world came into existence 5 minutes ago.
	www.umsu.de /wo/archive/2004/12/10/Indifference (1338 words)

	BOOK OF FUNDAMENTALS: REALISM BEFORE AND AFTER DEATH
		Neither the neutrality principle in general nor the indifference principle in particular forces us to accept any belief concerning the question of whether a person or mental being remains in existence after 'er body has died (or did already exist before 'er body came into being).
		The type of realism founded in the principle of indifference which preserves the nanhappy mean between unrealistic optimism and unrealistic pessimism is decision-theoretical realism.
		This could be a reason to argue that the principle of indifference, like the principle of truth, is not a ground-world principle.
	www.trinp.org /MNI/BoF/4/3/3.HTM (1324 words)

	Ephilosopher (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		The strategy relies on an indifference principle that is not up to the task.
		In general, there are two things to dislike about indifference principles: adopting one normally means confusing risk for uncertainty, and they tend to lead to incoherent views in some ‚paradoxical situations.
		I defend a principle of indifference for self-locating belief which entails that after Dr. Evil learns that a duplicate has been created, he ought to have exactly the same degree of belief that he is Dr. Evil as that he is the duplicate.
	www.ephilosopher.com /print.php?sid=519 (265 words)

	CSP - 'Mysticism and Philosophy' by W.T. Stace
		Our principle says that if the phenomenological descriptions of the two experiences are indistinguishable, so far as can be ascertained, then it cannot be denied that if one is a genuine mystical experience the other is also.
		This will follow notwithstanding the lowly antecedents of one of them, and in spite of the understandable annoyance of an ascetic, a saint, or a spiritual hero, who is told that his careless and worldly neighbor, who never did anything to deserve it, has attained to mystical consciousness by swallowing a pill.
		Another application of our principle which might be quoted arises in connection with the second of the three well-known periods of mystical illumination in the life of Jakob Boehme.
	www.csp.org /chrestomathy/mysticism_and_philosophy.html (215 words)

	Learning Objectives - Indifference Curves (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		Indifference curves are presented to provide a better understanding of how constrained utility maximization occurs.
		The principle of indifference suggests the consumer has identical preferences with respect to more than one basket of goods.
		The indifference curve function is defined such that the level of total utility along it is constant, meaning the consumer is indifferent about the various quantities spanned by it's definition.
	nova.umuc.edu /~black/code/umax50lo.html_code (99 words)

	Michael Benedikt Article (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		The Principle of Indifference, which we have already touched upon, states that "...the felt realness of any world depends on the degree of its indifference to the presence of a particular 'user' and on its resistance to his/her desire." What is real rather than imaginary always pushes back.
		The Principle of Indifference also implies strongly that, in a world we take to be real, life goes on in one's absence.
		The Principle of Personal Visibility is a perfect example of the sort of mixture between two realms of Law, the physical and the social, which the design of virtual worlds and cyberspace forces us to entertain.
	www.utexas.edu /architecture/center/benedikt_articles/physics.html (2248 words)

	Structure of Intelligence: Chapter 9- Perception
		Laplace's "Principle of Indifference" states that if a question is known to have exactly n possible answers, and these answers are mutually exclusive, then in the absence of any other knowledge one should assume each of these answers to have probability 1/n of being correct.
		Then, according to the Principle of Indifference, if this were the only thing you knew about Uxmylargq, you would assign a probability of 1/3 to the statement that it is blue, a probability of 1/3 to the statement that it is green, and a probability of 1/3 to the statement that it is orange.
		Like the Principle of Indifference, the maximum entropy principle is provably correct in certain special cases, but in the general case, justifying it or applying it requires ad hoc, something-out-of-nothing assumptions.
	goertzel.org /books/intel/chapter_nine.htm (9632 words)

	Ayahuasca Pantheistic Society - Causal Indifference
		The principle seems logical and obvious, but perhaps seems to have little practical relevance at the moment.
		Our principle says that if the phenomenological descriptions of the two experiences are indistinguishable, as far as one can tell, then if one of them is a genuine mystical experience, one cannot deny that the other one is too.
		This is true despite the relatively modest preparation behind one of them, and the understandable annoyance of an ascetic, a saint or a spiritual hero who is told that a worldly and negligent neighbour who has apparently done nothing to deserve such a prize, has reached a mystic state of consciousness by swallowing a pill.
	www.panhuasca.org.br /ingles/acausalidade.htm (235 words)

	The Monte Hall Problem
		Then the principle of indifference is correctly applied at the beginning of the game and the probability that your original choice is correct is 1/3 (no matter what strategy you use to choose).
		Applying the principle of indifference the probabilities are 1/3, 1/3, and 1/3.
		Applying the principle of indifference the probabilities are 1/4, 1/4, 1/4, and 1/4.
	www.stat.umn.edu /~charlie/goats.html (1010 words)

	"Live Burial": Melissa Hardie reviews Andrew Riemer
		Riemer's position as naïf is supported in the text through the principle of accident: things happen to him almost despite himself, through forces that are given here as a parody of the conventions of romance: fortuitous happenings and ineluctable fate.
		Riemer's confessions of parodic performance, from the construction of a thesis which was primarily an "illusory edifice," (94) to his amusing account of months of fruitless research in the Public Records Office, work to convey less a sense of the accidental than of the disappointed.
		On the one hand, devotion to scholarship required, in Riemer's account, maintaining a sense of separation from the everyday practice of academia, and, as Riemer foreshadows, "such habits and casts of mind, which were to absorb me at first emotionally, later intellectually, came to seem indefensibly vain and irresponsible" (11).
	www.lib.latrobe.edu.au /AHR/archive/Issue-September-1998/hardie.html (2964 words)

	VOLUME VI_25
		It is however a subject that one should study: what is gained by interest, and what is accomplished by indifference, all there is to be gained by interest, and all there is to be lost by indifference.
		Indifference can also be divided into four classes: indifference to oneself as when a person says, 'I do not care what people say; I am not interested in myself; I have other things on my mind.' That is one kind of indifference.
		Indifference is attained by developing interest, and by developing discrimination in one's interest.
	wahiduddin.net /mv2/VI/VI_25.htm (2563 words)

	[No title]
		This requires a new premise, a Principle of Indifference which states that under such circumstances your credence in the two situations should be equal.
		The Sleeping Beauty faces a similar uncertainty and can resolve it by means of a Principle of Indifference but in the story told below she uses a different strategy.
		All these authors have used a Principle of Indifference in their arguments; the different conclusions arise from differences in other premises.
	www.maproom.co.uk /nsw/sbindif.doc (1124 words)

	Interpretations of Probability
		The notion is finessed by the so-called ‘principle of indifference’, a coinage due to Keynes.
		Roughly, the principle is that rational credences strive to ‘track’ propensities -- sometimes called “chances” -- so that if a rational agent knows the propensity of a given outcome, her degree of belief will be the same.
		There are already signs of the rehabilitation of classical and logical probability, and in particular the principle of indifference and the principle of maximum entropy, by authors such as Stove (1986), Bartha and Johns (2001), Festa (1993), Paris and Vencovská (1997), and Maher (2000, 2001).
	setis.library.usyd.edu.au /stanford/entries/probability-interpret (15169 words)

	Insufficient reason and maximum entropy
		The first and most famous criterion for choosing initial probabilities is the simple Principle of Insufficient Reason (or Indifference Principle): If there is no reason to prefer one hypothesis over alternatives, simply attribute the same probability to all of them.
		The indifference principle applied to coin and die tossing, to card games or to other simple and symmetric problems, yields to the well-known rule of probability evaluation that we have called combinatorial.
		Since it is impossible not to agree with this point of view, in the cases for which one judges that it does apply, the combinatorial ``definition'' of probability is recovered in the Bayesian approach if the word ``definition'' is simply replaced by ``evaluation rule''.
	www.roma1.infn.it /~dagos/cern/node48.html (275 words)

	Principle of Indifference
		The fundamental principle of statistical theory that unless there is a reason for believing otherwise, each possible event should be regarded as equally likely.
		In this crude form, the principle leads to paradoxes because we can group the alternatives in different ways: the next flower I meet might be blue or red, so its being blue has a probability of one-half; but it also might be blue or crimson or scarlet, so the probability of blue is only one-third).
		Evidently we require not mere absence of knowledge of reasons favoring one alternative over another, but knowledge of the absence of such reasons.
	www.philosophyprofessor.com /philosophies/indifference-principle.php (202 words)

	[No title] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		Argument for Principle: This principle seems to follow directly from the definition of conditional epistemic probability, which measures the rational degree of belief we should have in the truth of a proposition given we only consider as relevant the body of information on which it is being conditioned.
		Application of Principle: Let e' denote the claim that the state of affairs E' obtains, where E' denotes the state of affairs of the universe containing embodied, conscious beings whose overall existence is a positive good.
		The principle of indifference for the continuous case, therefore, tells us that the probability of its hitting the bull's-eye is the same as the probability of hitting any other part of the dart board of equal area.
	home.messiah.edu /~rcollins/finetech.htm (13244 words)

	Abstract (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		The Principle of Indifference, which dictates that we ought to assign two outcomes equal probability in the absence of known reasons to do otherwise, is vulnerable to well-known objections.
		Nevertheless, the appeal of the principle, and of symmetry-based assignments of equal probability, persists.
		We show that, relative to a given class of symmetries satisfying certain properties, we are justified in calling certain outcomes equally probable, and more generally, in defining what we call relative probabilities.
	www.socsci.uci.edu /lps/psa2k/abstracts/bartha-johns.html (95 words)

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