So one makes things more simple, and the other makes things less complicated? :P
I think we'd all agree that walking is a pretty simple task, right?
That's what computer scientists thought. Took them 30 years, and they couldn't get robots to make their way without falling over a chair. They gave up. Tried a learning algorithm instead, which basically meant the robot taught itself to walk.
What about 1 + 1 = 2? Really simple, right?
That's what logicians thought. Only took Alfred Whitehead and Bertrand Russell 362 pages. You can see an extremely simplified version
here. Mind you, that one makes a LOT of assumptions, like the entirety of the principles of propositional logic.
Our conscious minds make assumptions all the time. Take when you learned to drive. In the beginning, it was really hard. After a few months, fairly easy. After a few years, you don't even have to think about it. If you don't have to think about it now, why did you have to think about what to do when you learned? Because your subconscious learned how to drive, and is driving for you. It's doing all the calculations without us even being aware of it.
We call this the 4 stages of learning: unconscious incompetence (when you don't even know just how little you know), conscious incompetence (now you know just how little you know), conscious competence (now you know just how much you have to remember just to do it to the minimum level of competency), and unconscious incompetence (now your subconscious does it all for you). It's only the last stage that we call "simple".
Trying to remove all the assumptions, is trying to do what your subconscious does for you.
OK. So, how much exactly does your subconscious do for you?
Well, to give you an idea, scientists have got around to using brain scans to measure how much of your brain's processing power is devoted to the subconscious and the conscious. The estimates vary between scientists. Some scientists say that how much of your brain's processing power is used for the conscious is the top edge of a piece of A4, to a single dot to a piece of A4. The rest, which is hundreds to millions of times your conscious brain's thinking, is your subconscious.
Put another way: We USED to think that your conscious was like a million scientists all working in the LHC, with a single janitor as the subconscious, to switch on and off the lights. We assumed we were doing all the thinking.
NOW we know that your mind is more like the entire American government, with all of its agencies, NSA, CIA, Firefighters, police, CDC, public health system, public education system, and everything else that the government does. You are Obama. Your subconscious is everyone else. Turns out, our subconscious is doing nearly all the thinking, and we're just getting the final results.
What we call "simple" are the final results. We have no clue how we got there, or why, or what it's dependent on, because all that mammoth info is worked out by the subconscious, so fast, that it would take us months just to figure out what our subconscious worked out in a single second.
What we call "making no assumptions" is what our subconscious had to work out to get to those results, AND proving all the assumptions that our brains previously worked out, that it used to build up those results, AND the working out of those assumptions that they were based on, and so on, and so forth. Think just how much we'd need to work out, to get to what we call "simple" answers, if we don't make all those assumptions, and had to do all that working out. Like going back to the first homo sapiens, and trying to teach them physics from scratch. We'd have to teach them language, fire, counting, arithmetic, how to do an experiment, and everything we take for granted.
If someone misuses it, just link them to the wiki article.
Love to. But Wiki keeps changing on me. I can't quote half the things I read on Wiki, because the articles have been completely re-written, and often, they read like entirely different articles and reach entirely different conclusions to the ones that I read.
If someone is even bothering to learn the names of inductive principles they are probably able (but not necessarily willing) to interpret it correctly.
I've seen people switch the concepts of induction and deduction numerous times. Other concepts as well. Atheist used to mean someone who was pretty certain there were no gods. Now it means someone who's not absolutely sure. Faith used to mean that you trusted in someone's ability, based on knowledge of them. Now it means believing in a religious deity with absolutely no evidence whatsoever, which used to be called "blind faith". I'm really struggling to have a decent conversation anymore, because every time I do, the dictionary seems to have completely altered, as if English has become French, then German, then Ukranian, then Arabic, every 5 years or so.
And besides, if someone is able to somehow turn this around in their head, it's likely they would just find something else to justify their beliefs in its absence.
Yes, that's true. That's happening all the time now. It used to be that being "reason-able" meant someone you could reason with, someone who would actually listen to a valid rational argument, and accept the truth of it. Now it seems the being "reason-able" means someone who will invent as many arguments as they can to reject anything that doesn't agree with their desires, no matter how true it is, and no matter how much overwhelming logic and evidence show it to be true.
