Abduction forms part of the basis of ID reasoning. A Norwegian police detective fills us in on how to use abduction for better thinking:
Fahsing point outs that criminal investigations are generally abductive rather than deductive. The detective is not given a hard arithmetic problem to work out. A computer could do that. Rather, the detective has a series of facts to make sense of. That involves creativity in organizing one’s research and thinking strategies. Computers don’t do creativity.
Here are a couple of the many tips he offers:
“You should always create a short outline of all the possible alternative explanations you can think of for the situation you are trying to solve”
“Try to eliminate as many explanations or lines of inquiry as you can. Just like in science, theories can be truly tested only through falsification.”
News, “The underrated thinking skill that you can do but computers can’t” at Mind Matters News
Curiously, among the Woke in science, isn’t there a sort of war on falsification? But of course there is. Why wouldn’t there be?
Takehome: Abductive reasoning, reasoning from effects to causes, is a powerful mechanism for reasoning in the absence of complete knowledge.
Also from Mind Matters News, today:
Young filmmaker tackles the hype about computing the brain. In Silico, in which Noah Hutton sorts hope from hype, goes livestream today. The main thing Hutton tries to convey is that ambition and flashy hype are no match for the sheer complexity of the human brain.
and
How Erik Larson hit on a method for deciding who is influential. The author of The Myth of Artificial Intelligence decided to apply an algorithm to Wikipedia — but it had to be very specific
Many measures of influence depend on rough measures like numbers of hits on pages. Larson realized that influence is subtler than that.