Treating a property of one's own model as a property of the world, so that ignorance is read as randomness and unfamiliarity as complexity.
Jaynes introduced it in probability theory: probability describes a state of knowledge, and calling an event random asserts something about the speaker rather than the event. The general form covers a great deal of confused argument, since mysterious, obvious, simple and weird are all relations between a mind and a thing, and all get stated as though they were features of the thing.
In practice
- A process described as unpredictable is being described by someone who cannot predict it.
- A design called intuitive is intuitive to the person who built it, which is the one datum that does not count.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Science & Epistemology
- Essay
- The ways evidence misleads