Exceedingly Silly Personal Statement
Apr. 9th, 2003 03:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gusl(I also gave them an abridged version, in case they didn't accept this because it exceeds 100 words by a lot)
Personal Statement - FULL VERSION
I wish to be a student at the ILLC because it is the best place I know to explore my interdisciplinary interests.
If I had to summarize my strongest interests in a few words, I would say "Cybernetics and Philosophy of Science".
I love to study the logical structure of systems such as natural languages, music and even soccer. I have been fascinated by theories of information, and have read some philosophy from J. Pierce's "An Introduction to Information Theory" and G. Chaitin's "The Limits of Mathematics".
I have a strong interest in Bayesian probability theory, and the philosophy of what constitutes a reasonable prior. I am intrigued by philosophical questions like "Why are some distributions more 'natural' than others?", and "How can one infer causality from non-experimental data?". In this area, I have read from E.T. Jaynes's "Probability: The Logic of Science" and J. Pearl's "Causality".
In my quest for correct reasoning, and for the elimination of meaningless arguments, I decided to investigate the formalization of knowledge. I have read and thought about verification / proof systems such as NuPRL. I dream of a project for formalizing (thereby justifying) all scientific knowledge. I believe that the computer can be a great theoretical aid to scientists, if only we can bridge the gap between formal and informal theories.
I am also very interested in Cognitive Science and cognitive modeling.
After spending a year at an uninteresting job as a programmer, I decided to take a break. So I went to ESSLLI 2002, and I discovered epistemic logic. It was very interesting by itself, and it also provided fuel for my thoughts about rationality and game theory. Since then, I have bought two books on the subject, and have tried to study it in more depth.
Unfortunately, despite spending so much time reading and thinking about these interesting questions, I have made little concrete progress. Since all this was done by me alone, I lacked foundational knowledge, guidance from experts and the discipline to investigate the problems rigorously. In fact, there are severe gaps in my knowledge. I need to fill these gaps so that I can produce good research.
While the root of my interests is mostly philosophical, I feel an urge to tackle them at a technical level. Besides that, most "mono-disciplinary" departments tend to be restricted in their focus and approach. Thus I believe that no Philosophy, Economics, Cognitive Science or Computer Science department can satisfy my interests better than the ILLC, which is interested in questions across all of these fields. Not only that, but it would allow me to study logic in depth, and apply it to my problems of interest. I am excited about such a prospect, and this is why I believe that the ILLC is the best choice for me.
Personal Statement - FULL VERSION
I wish to be a student at the ILLC because it is the best place I know to explore my interdisciplinary interests.
If I had to summarize my strongest interests in a few words, I would say "Cybernetics and Philosophy of Science".
I love to study the logical structure of systems such as natural languages, music and even soccer. I have been fascinated by theories of information, and have read some philosophy from J. Pierce's "An Introduction to Information Theory" and G. Chaitin's "The Limits of Mathematics".
I have a strong interest in Bayesian probability theory, and the philosophy of what constitutes a reasonable prior. I am intrigued by philosophical questions like "Why are some distributions more 'natural' than others?", and "How can one infer causality from non-experimental data?". In this area, I have read from E.T. Jaynes's "Probability: The Logic of Science" and J. Pearl's "Causality".
In my quest for correct reasoning, and for the elimination of meaningless arguments, I decided to investigate the formalization of knowledge. I have read and thought about verification / proof systems such as NuPRL. I dream of a project for formalizing (thereby justifying) all scientific knowledge. I believe that the computer can be a great theoretical aid to scientists, if only we can bridge the gap between formal and informal theories.
I am also very interested in Cognitive Science and cognitive modeling.
After spending a year at an uninteresting job as a programmer, I decided to take a break. So I went to ESSLLI 2002, and I discovered epistemic logic. It was very interesting by itself, and it also provided fuel for my thoughts about rationality and game theory. Since then, I have bought two books on the subject, and have tried to study it in more depth.
Unfortunately, despite spending so much time reading and thinking about these interesting questions, I have made little concrete progress. Since all this was done by me alone, I lacked foundational knowledge, guidance from experts and the discipline to investigate the problems rigorously. In fact, there are severe gaps in my knowledge. I need to fill these gaps so that I can produce good research.
While the root of my interests is mostly philosophical, I feel an urge to tackle them at a technical level. Besides that, most "mono-disciplinary" departments tend to be restricted in their focus and approach. Thus I believe that no Philosophy, Economics, Cognitive Science or Computer Science department can satisfy my interests better than the ILLC, which is interested in questions across all of these fields. Not only that, but it would allow me to study logic in depth, and apply it to my problems of interest. I am excited about such a prospect, and this is why I believe that the ILLC is the best choice for me.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2003-04-10 09:19 am (UTC)I have a strong interest in Bayesian probability theory, and the philosophy of what constitutes a reasonable prior. I am intrigued by philosophical questions like "Why are some distributions more 'natural' than others?", and "How can one infer causality from non-experimental data?". In this area, I have read from E.T. Jaynes's "Probability: The Logic of Science" and J. Pearl's "Causality".
I haven't read these books, but I'm intrigued by these questions as well. Are you familiar with the so-called "Doomsday Arguement"? I have always suspected it is bs, but never really known how to phrase it. If you don't know what I'm talking about, I'll search for it and find a link.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-04-12 08:10 pm (UTC)But browsing quickly through Nick Bostrom's page, I can see that this stuff is very interesting.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-04-12 10:26 pm (UTC)(mainly the first paragraph:)
The Doomsday argument was conceived by the astrophysicist Brandon Carter some fifteen years ago, and it has since been developed in a Nature article by Richard Gott [1993], and in several papers by philosopher John Leslie and especially in his recent monograph The End of The World (Leslie [1996]). The core idea is this. Imagine that two big urns are put in front of you, and you know that one of them contains ten balls and the other a million, but you are ignorant as to which is which. You know the balls in each urn are numbered 1, 2, 3, 4 ... etc. Now you take a ball at random from the left urn, and it is number 7. Clearly, this is a strong indication that that urn contains only ten balls. If originally the odds were fifty-fifty, a swift application of Bayes' theorem gives you the posterior probability that the left urn is the one with only ten balls. (Pposterior (L=10) = 0.999990). But now consider the case where instead of the urns you have two possible human races, and instead of balls you have individuals, ranked according to birth order. As a matter of fact, you happen to find that your rank is about sixty billion. Now, say Carter and Leslie, we should reason in the same way as we did with the urns. That you should have a rank of sixty billion or so is much more likely if only 100 billion persons will ever have lived than if there will be many trillion persons. Therefore, by Bayes' theorem, you should update your beliefs about mankind's prospects and realise that an impending doomsday is much more probable than you have hitherto thought.
It gets even worse when you consider that the population is growing quickly over time... in other words, the chances that you are born near the end of the human race is much greater than the chances that you're born near the beginning. But of course, it all rests on Bayesian assumptions that are kind of dubious if you ask me.