Nice to discover Judea Pearl ask a fundamental question. What's an 'inductive bias'?

I crucial step on the road towards AGI is a richer vocabulary for reasoning about inductive biases.
@yudapearl explores the apparent impedance mismatch between inductive biases and causal reasoning. But isn't the logical thinking required for good causal reasoning also not an inductive bias?
An inductive bias is what C.S. Peirce would call a habit. It is a habit of reasoning. Logical thinking is like a Platonic solid of the many kinds of heuristics that are discovered.
The kind of black and white logic that is found in digital computers is critical to the emergence of today's information economy. This of course is not the same logic that drives the general intelligence that lives in the same economy.
Digital computers do not have the inductive biases to navigate the complex and messy world of life. Look around, have you seen a machine with the autonomy of a honey bee? They simply have no grounding in life.
General intelligence emerges out of things that are alive. To construct a synthetic general intelligence requires the kind of algorithm that organically grows itself from the inside out.
Which requires the kind of inductive biases that are organic in nature. https://t.co/64gYeKBtI2
So what this reveals is that an inductive bias is an emergent feature of a complex process. Just like the wetness of water. It is interesting to identify these biases, but they aren't the process themselves. They are how we describe the process.
Things that our brains can identify are things that exhibit recurring patterns. We feel the wetness of water because that wetness repeats itself every time we feel water. This causation invariance in nature forges the causality reasoning necessary for navigating a messy world.
An inductive bias is the identifiable recurring thought process (i.e. habits) the brain has developed in the process of its own constructive development while growing into this world.
This said one should never mistake the map from the actual territory. A cognitive bias developed by too many is to confuse the two.
@threadreaderapp unroll

More from Carlos E. Perez

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How I created content in 2020

A thread...

Back in Aug 2016, I started creating content to share my experiences as an entrepreneur.
Over 3 years I had put out 1,200+ hours of content - posting every week without


Little did I know that something I started almost 4 years back would give my life an entirely new direction.

At the end of 2019, my biggest platform was LinkedIn with ~700K followers.

In Jan 2020, I decided to build a team that would help me with the content.

I ran a month long recruitment drive to hire a team of interns.

It comprised 4 detailed rounds - starting with my loved 20 questions, then an assignment, then a WhatsApp video round and finally F2F.

Through 1,200+ applications, I finally selected 6 profiles, starting March.

I am a firm believer in @peterthiel's one task, one person philosophy
So the team was structured such that everyone was responsible for ONLY one task

1. Content ideas
2. Videography
3. Video editing
4. LinkedIn (+TikTok) distribution
5. FB+IG distribution
6. YouTube distribution

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For example, though far from perfect, IQ is the single-best predictor of job performance we have – much better than Emotional Intelligence, the Big Five, Grit, etc. https://t.co/rKUgKDAAVx https://t.co/DWbVI8QSU3


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