10 papers
Pessimistic Meta-Induction and Its Limits: Lessons from Frequentist Statistics and Machine Learning Theory
Hanti Lin
This paper challenges the pessimistic meta-inductive argument against scientific realism by undermining its inductive step rather than its historical premise. Although related chal…
Cross-Entropy Risk Estimation for Language Models: Inconsistency Must Be Dense, and the Holdout Method Is No Exception
Hanti Lin
Language models are compared by their held-out per-token cross-entropy risk---the quantity scaling laws are fitted to. We show that it cannot be consistently estimated. Consistency…
Meager Success: A Theory of the Unlearnable for Hypothesis Testing
Hanti Lin
When the standard of pointwise consistency for statistical inference -- convergence to the truth in every possible state of the world -- is provably unachievable, the usual respons…
Never Too LATE: A Fully Stochastic Update to the Potential Outcome Framework
Hanti Lin
In the classic potential outcome framework, the local average treatment effect (LATE) and its identification via an instrumental variable are stated in a deterministic setting at t…
A Plea for History and Philosophy of Statistics and Machine Learning
Hanti Lin
The integration of the history and philosophy of statistics was initiated at least by Hacking (1975) and advanced by Hacking (1990), Mayo (1996), and Zabell (2005), but it has not…
The Problem of the Priors, or Posteriors?
Hanti Lin
The problem of the priors is well known: it concerns the challenge of identifying norms that govern one's prior credences. I argue that a key to addressing this problem lies in con…
Scientific Realism vs. Anti-Realism: Toward a Common Ground
Hanti Lin
The debate between scientific realism and anti-realism remains at a stalemate, making reconciliation seem hopeless. Yet, important work remains: exploring a common ground, even if…
Unified Inductive Logic: From Formal Learning to Statistical Inference to Supervised Learning
Hanti Lin
While the traditional conception of inductive logic is Carnapian, I develop a Peircean alternative and use it to unify formal learning theory, statistics, and a significant part of…
Convergence to the Truth
Hanti Lin
This article reviews and develops an epistemological tradition in the philosophy of science, known as convergentism, which holds that inference methods should be assessed based on…
The Logic of Counterfactuals and the Epistemology of Causal Inference
Hanti Lin
The 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics recognized an epistemology of causal inference based on the Rubin causal model (Rubin 1974), which merits broader attention in philosophy. This mo…