Representing and intervening
by Ian Hacking · first published 1983
7mentions
4recommended by
5HN commenters
2012–2025first – last mentioned
80% recommend20% neutral
An introduction to the philosophy of natural science, organized around the central theme of scientific realism.
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…Alongside this I'd like to know what you think journalists do well? Edit: For a sociolinguistic perspective, see Lakoff (both of them). On the representation of "fact," Ian Hacking has an excellent book, "Representing and Intervening" which looks at Kuhn, Popper, Feyerabend, etc.
on “If engineers were journalists” ↗…and passing my classes to really give his work serious intellectual consideration. Moving into a new home the summer I graduated, I found a pile of books left on the curb. One of them was Ian Hacking's Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Science. I ended up tearing through it, utterly fascinated by the ideas and the philosophical landscape -- an agenda of discussion -- that he laid out so clearly,…
on “Ian Hacking, Eminent Philosopher of Science and Much Else, Dies at 87” ↗…of noise surrounding the topic, because that'd be a lie. If it were easy, ML systems wouldn't be "black boxes"![5] I would also encourage you to learn some meta physics. Something like Ian Hacking's representing and Intervening is a good start. There are limitations to what can be understand through experimentation alone, famously illustrated in Dyson's recounting of then Fermi rejected his paper[6]. There is a common misunderstanding…
on “Pen and Paper Exercises in Machine Learning (2022)” ↗…statistics or any book on the subject of metaphysics. A causal statistics book will teach you this as you learn about confounding variables and structural equation modeling. For metaphysics Ian Hacking's "Representing and Intervening" is a good pick, as well as Polya's famous "How To Solve It" (though it is metamathematics). [0] (Mind you, Dyson says "went with the math instead of the physics" but what he's actually talking about…
on “Persona vectors: Monitoring and controlling character traits in language models” ↗…heliocentric model is clearly a better understanding and more accurate as a whole. If you want to dive deeper into this topic I'd highly recommend both the podcast "An Opinionated History of Math" and the book "Representing and Intervening" by Ian Hacking. They're both very approachable. FWIW, metaphysics talks about this quite a lot. > My first problem is that there are many people that claim that they have NO internal monologue So…
on “Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents” ↗Still remember randomly coming across his book "Representing and Intervening" when I first got interested in philosophy of science. Pleasantly readable and illuminating. Great companion piece to other works by Cartwright or van Fraassen.
on “Ian Hacking, Eminent Philosopher of Science and Much Else, Dies at 87” ↗This strongly reminds me of things touched on in Ian Hacking's Representing and Intervening. Early on he mentions that done medieval philosophers thought that crabs emerge out of tree trunks and later transform into ducks. Obviously that's total nonsense from our perspective but it might be…
on “What If Evolution Bred Reality Out of Us?” ↗