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    Carmelics

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    Made withinDC&Austin
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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that The No-Free-Lunch theorems are versions of the argument in Hume's first fork

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Hume's first fork concerns the epistemic status of propositions, not the performance guarantees of computational procedures across problem distributions.
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    • 2.NFL theorems are mathematical results about aggregate performance over all possible functions, while Hume's fork addresses whether a single proposition's negation implies contradiction.
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    • 3.Conflating mathematical universality claims with Humean demonstrative necessity commits a category error between meta-level algorithmic results and object-level epistemic justification.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Wolpert and Macready's NFL theorems presuppose a uniform prior over all possible target functions, a substantive assumption Hume's skeptical argument does not require.
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    • 2.Because NFL theorems are conditional on a specific probability measure over problem spaces, they yield a weaker, measure-dependent impossibility rather than Hume's unconditional logical gap between experience and necessity.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.Hume's first fork distinguishes demonstrative from probable reasoning, where demonstrative arguments require logical necessity
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    • 2.The No-Free-Lunch theorems show that no contradiction arises from an algorithm failing to perform well, ruling out logical necessity of good performance
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