I’ve seen critiques of Sinn Féin’s drift into nativitism that claim that these arise because the party is uniquely post-truth as a result of their decades of I think that’s an important misdiagnosis because I’m my experience of Irish politics most political parties don’t care about the truth, so Sinn...
With Government bodies, policy makers, and institutions being entrusted with directing increasingly large shares of the collective public effort (as measured by GDP) there is an enormous public interest in ensuring that the right policies are implemented at the right time, and for an appropriate duration. This has led to...
Hierarchical clustering groups data rows into trees of clusters, there are two main approaches, bottom up, and top down. Aggolmerative hierarchical clustering: every row is assigned to its own cluster initially. Clusters that are closest to each other are then merged and the process iterates with fewer/larger clusters until all...
Given a dataset of n-rows select k-rows such that k≤n. These are the seed rows for creating k clusters within the dataset. The efficacy of the method is determined by how well chosen these initial cells are. Should they be too close together, say two rows within a cluster that...
Less precise than other forms of modelling (specifically classification). The development of useful information from the data and the identification of a particular cluster often requires significant domain expertise. It is a form of unstructured learning as the algorithm defines the clusters, and groups the instances accordingly. The aim of...
There are two primary goals when applying an algorithm; we approach the data with a goal of describing the data as they are, or using the data to extrapolate about future likelihoods. Often we can combine the too too, but these can be exclusive applications. There are several different classes...
In Korsgaards’s “The Sources of Normativity” she makes the case that in modern moral philosophy the challenge has been to ground the ought; if morality argues that we ought to behave a certain way, then what is it about the nature of morality that it can command our behaviour? If...
Ingold in his “An Anthropologist looks at Biology” draws inspiration from physics, developing a “Quantum Field Theory”-like prism through which we can analyse life, whatever that may be. He offers a critique on Neo-Darwinism. From the text, he seems to be referring to the theory that was popularised under Dawkins’...
Ingold in his “An Anthropologist looks at Biology” draws inspiration from physics, developing a “Quantum Field Theory”-like prism through which we can analyse life, whatever that may be. He offers a critique on Neo-Darwinism, the Dawkins “Selfish Gene” model and argues convincingly that that is a theory that is not...
Not uniquely among animals, humans are a tool using animal. We seem to be very efficient at tool use, and also very efficient at teaching/learning how to use tools. Tooling about is something that we do. At a fundamental level toolmaking precedes us as a species. Toolmaking is something that...