Reality is about what is real. Objects are real. They are made of matter (atoms) they have shape and location. Amplitudes, configurations,laws and flow are not real. They are not objects they are what objects do.
I understand why you think so, since your species evolved with sensors that work at a particular macro level, and so intuitively you expect everything in reality to work the same way. It does not make sense to you that the same rules don’t apply if you go really really fast, or if you’re looking at something really really big or really really tiny, or if you’re observing a process over a very short or very long time scale.
Sadly, this is a design flaw in your brain. You will not likely be able to rework your intuitions so that reality always “makes sense”. Reality doesn’t have to conform to your preconceptions, and your brain just isn’t made to radically transform itself like that.
Luckily, you can choose to use a mechanism other than human intuition to understand the universe. Like mathematics, which seems to do a much better job, even in a way observable to humans. We have lots of devices (observable at human scales!) that do exactly what the mathematics said they would, like GPS.
But despair not! It’s not completely a lost cause. Even though we are not made to understand things directly using math all the time, there are ways of retraining your intuitions to some extent, and correcting for your design flaws in other ways where that’s not possible. Figuring out how to do that is the primary mission of this site.
Luckily, you can choose to use a mechanism other than human intuition to understand the universe. Like mathematics, which seems to do a much better job, even in a way observable to humans. We have lots of devices (observable at human scales!) that do exactly what the mathematics said they would, like GPS.
I think there is a common miscommunication on this point. If something cannot be understood in the conventional human sense, can it be understood via math? It depends on what we mean by “understand.” We can certainly catalog what we observe and summarize those data in the form of mathematical formulae and models.
However, if those are merely very succinct summaries, it is no surprise that they make accurate predictions, as they would effectively just be extrapolating from the observed data. It also seems unsatisfying to call that a theory in the traditional sense, if it is really more like curve-fitting.
Einstein said one should be able to explain any theory to a barmaid and Feynman said if you can’t explain it to a 6 year old then you don’t understand it.
Both of them were pretty good at explaining things, as scientists went, but this is a serious exaggeration as far as the actual comprehensibility of the theories goes. The six most accessible chapters from the Feynman Lectures on Physics, republished separately as Six Easy Pieces, are still way over the head of an ordinary six year old, and the Theory of Relativity was famously little understood in its time. I recall reading one anecdote by a contemporary where he says that he spent several days with Einstein, and every day Einstein tried to explain the theory to him. He said that by the end of it, he still couldn’t make head or tails of it but was convinced Einstein knew what he was talking about.
Some theories in physics today are genuinely very difficult to understand, and take a lot of focused study to make sense of. I was accounted a pretty promising student in physics, and dropped the subject after a year in college, and a lot of stuff was still way over my head by the time I switched tracks. But the reason they actually believe these theories, and consider them theories rather than simply conjectures, is that they’re very well supported by evidence. They’re unintuitive and hard to understand, but it appears that they’re actually true regardless.
Human beings never faced evolutionary selection pressure towards being able to understand the most fundamental workings of reality. There’s no particular reason they should be easy for us to understand.
It was never “true” that the earth was flat. Obviously the earth was round before people figured out that it was round, but there were no experiments which “confirmed” that the earth was flat. The earth was demonstrated to be round by experiment in the third century BC, and we have no evidence of any experiments predating that which indicated otherwise. The roundness of the earth was not discovered by the “common sense” of ships vanishing over the horizon.
Experiments showed that the earth was round, to within a small margin of error. Further discoveries showed that, within that margin of error, it was not perfectly round. At each step, experiments advanced our knowledge, rather than misleading us. There is actually a specific coined term for the position you’re arguing, using the same argument, and this is it.
Common sense has lost out quite a lot in science. Einstein himself, for instance, criticized quantum mechanical models, arguing that if they were true, we would expect nonsensical things like quantum entanglement, so we should be pretty sure that the models were wrong. Unfortunately, reality came back with a resounding “screw you Einstein, quantum entanglement is totally a thing.”
Math, on the other hand, has a much better track record. We do not have a history of mathematically proving that something should never happen, for instance, and reality comes back and says “tough, I’m doing it anyway.” We have a track record of working out mathematical formulas that work when you apply them to abstract numbers, and then when we use mathematical models to try and make predictions about the real world, they actually work. Do you know how black holes were discovered? First, people did the math, based on our models of physical law, and found that if you plug the numbers in, if you pack enough matter together, black holes are what you get. It wasn’t until years later that we made the observations that showed that black holes really do exist.
This is why scientists use mathematical models of reality, not just “common sense.” It works. If it were easier than common sense explanation, we would have been doing this thousands of years ago, but it’s not. And so the people who have computers, satellites, phones and airplanes, are us, the people living in a civilization founded on the fruits of science, and not the human race preceding the advent of science. It’s hard to argue with consistent, reliable results.
You know, that comic has always bugged me a bit. The quantum electrodynamics bit makes sense, but I see no way all that GPS devices are dependent on relativity to work. To get them to work right, we have to design them to account for the predictions of relativity, rather than just classical mechanics, but if the universe ran on classical mechanics rather than relativity, I can’t see any way in which it would prevent us from creating GPS devices; it seems to me that it would be even easier.
Relativity has loads of experimental support, but unless you count nuclear energy, which was already observed before the advent of the theory of relativity, if not explained, then I’m stuffed for examples on how industry’s benefited from it being true.
Relativity works describing reality, so companies are making a killing using it to build accurate GPS devices. A bit more roundabout than some of the others, but doesn’t seem “wrong”.
But unlike all the others, if Relativity weren’t true, they’d still be able to do that. They’d just do it by not incorporating the predictions of Relativity.
If electricity worked by classical models, we wouldn’t be building semiconductor circuits differently, we wouldn’t be able to build them at all. All the others could be implemented for initiatives that would be possible if they were real, but impossible otherwise, so Relativity is the odd one out.
There are doubtless other models by which electricity could hypothetically work that would allow circuits that do interesting things. I don’t see where the focus on specific “classical models” is drawn from.
Well it’s not so much that the connection was wrong. It just didn’t fit the pattern of “If this were real, people would be making a lot of money from it”. Because relativity doesn’t make GPS easier or cheaper. It’s just that if relativity were false, our GPS systems would be constructed differently.
To get them to work right, we have to design them to account for the predictions of relativity, rather than just classical mechanics, but if the universe ran on classical mechanics rather than relativity, I can’t see any way in which it would prevent us from creating GPS devices; it seems to me that it would be even easier.
Yeah, the comic seems to be missing the mark there.
Still, if we designed them to work taking into account relativity, and the universe ran on classical mechanics, then they would not work.
I almost typed out a long reply to this, but honestly, that would have been pointless. You are making the same mistakes, not simple points of disagreement, but very obvious and demonstrable mistakes, over and over. Please read the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions sequence before replying to any more of my comments, if you want me to respond.
OK, I will. I told you I would, but I have to answer all the responses. I will do that regardless of weather I think it is pointless, because I think it is respecting the forum.
But it would be helpful if you point out my mistakes. What if I read all this stuff and then still make the same “mistakes.” How will I ever know?
I am beginning to think it is a diversion. 2morrow I will read it all and I will be back.
OK, I will. But it would be helpful if you point out my mistakes. What if I read all this stuff and then still make the same “mistakes.” How will I ever know?
I am beginning to think it is a diversion.
If you continue to make the same mistakes after reading the sequence, the members here will continue to point them out, up to the limits of their patience.
Telling you to read the sequence is a diversion, in that while I could explain the same material myself given enough time, I would really rather not deal with responding to several simultaneous posts making the same mistakes over and over for the time it would take to cover all the material, given any alternative, and would much rather have the time to refresh my patience while you cover it on your own.
Good enough. Since I am demonstrating intellectual honesty and openess by reading everything you ask, can we agree to this? If I say I understand it but but that I disagree, will you then try to make the case for this half-silvered mirror experiment, or are we done?
Thank you for your patience. It is really appreciated.
I would ask you to explain the basis of your disagreement. If I felt like we were making any headway in mutual comprehension, I would be willing to make a case for the half-silvered mirror experiment, otherwise not.
The map is not the territory, and of course we can’t expect certainty in our map. That doesn’t mean the territory isn’t there; it just means we update our map as we find new things.
Suppose you have one theory that is very intuitive and easy to explain to a 6 year old but strongly conflicts with all of the experimental evidence you’ve collected, and another theory that is very counterintuitive and bizarre-looking but is heavily supported by the evidence. Which is more likely to be true? The second one, of course—when intuition conflicts with strong evidence, it generally means that your intuitions are flawed.
That’s essentially the situation we are in with respect to QM. It is clearly, obviously true given the evidence we’ve collected, and no amount of intuition can change that.
That’s more or less what philosophers tended to do back in Classical Greece. Unfortunately, it doesn’t actually work very well.
The less information you have, the less good a position you’re in to come up with plausible hypotheses. If you try and draw a map of a city before you go out and see what the city actually looks like, your map will almost certainly be wrong. Experiments are the “go out and look” step.
What sounds to you like a rational hypothesis might be very obviously wrong to someone who’d actually made the relevant observations. You could end up doing a whole lot of work theorizing and putting together a coherent model, and then go out and do your experiments and find that your theory is completely wrong and gives you nothing useful to work with. You could have saved a lot of effort by going out and looking and finding what observations your theory needs to account for.
Drawing your conclusions before doing your experiments is not just putting the cart before the horse, it’s worse. It’s like putting the cart in front of the horse in a narrow alleyway where it’s a nightmare to get them turned around again. Humans naturally get fixated on and attached to explanations, and once you’ve latched onto an idea, it tends to affect how you view all the new information you get. By the time you raise an explanation to the level of attention, you really should have enough information to home in on that particular explanation out of the whole space of possibilities.
I think you two may be talking past each other here. You clearly would do some observation before hypothesizing or theorizing, just perhaps not as much. I think the real difference between your positions lies in how you’re defining a theory or an explanation (as opposed to a description of appearances). The explanation that QM raised to a level of attention was not an explanation in the way you probably mean, but more like what you may call a description, like a summary of observations.
If someone says that square circles exist and they have the math to prove it, do I need to check their math?
If someone had a theory that made useful predictions about the behaviour of reality, and could be used to make cool technology like transistors, and the only way you could get it to work and give those predictions was to assume the existence of hypothetical, mathematical square circles, who are you to call that theory “wrong” or “false”? The universe isn’t obligated to be easy for us to understand, any more than it’s obligated to be easy to understand for a mouse.
Theories didn’t make transistors. People did at Bell Labs with trial and error. Predictions had nothing to do with it. Math had nothing to do with it.
I’m sorry, but historically speaking, this just isn’t true. See this page for details. Basically:
This idea that particles could only contain lumps of energy in certain sizes moved into other areas of physics as well. Over the next decade, Niels Bohr pulled it into his description of how an atom worked. He said that electrons traveling around a nucleus couldn’t have arbitrarily small or arbitrarily large amounts of energy, they could only have multiples of a standard “quantum” of energy.
Eventually scientists realized this explained why some materials are conductors of electricity and some aren’t since atoms with differing energy electron orbits conduct electricity differently. This understanding was crucial to building a transistor, since the crystal at its core is made by mixing materials with varying amounts of conductivity… Electrons acting like a wave can sometimes burrow right through a barrier. Understanding this odd behavior of electrons was necessary as scientists tried to control how current flowed through the first transistors.
It was people in the lab who created transistors, using trial and error to get just the correct mix of elements in the semiconductor crystal, but they knew it was remotely possible because the math of quantum mechanics predicted (and this was already verified in experiment) that electrons could ‘tunnel through’ an apparently non-conductive barrier–thus ‘semiconductor’. According to classical understanding of the atom, this wouldn’t happen, and so no one would try making something like a transistor, by trial and error or by theoretical prediction or whatever.
As far as I can tell, math has nothing to do with explaining the universe.
You’re just wrong. You just got told how the theories you consider ‘worthless’ make correct predictions and allow us to build cool stuff. The theories which you allow ‘make sense’ make incorrect predictions. When your “Monkeymind” disagrees with the universe the universe wins and you lose.
“Are you going to tell me 0 dimensions make sense?”
No, but we might ask you why you take intuition as the basis for accepting truth at all. That’s a pretty big implicit assumption you’re making.
“Theories didn’t make transistors. People did at Bell Labs with trial and error. Predictions had nothing to do with it. Math had nothing to do with it.”
Ah. The people did it without theories, math, or predictions? I’d like to know more!
Because I don’t know how one would go about constructing anything, e.g. a transistor, otherwise. You mineswell walk into a lab with equipment and randomly jam things together. (Heya, cat? ‘Meow’ Wanna help me build a transistor? ‘Meow’ Okay, let’s place you on top of this computer, maybe that will do something—I don’t know, because I don’t even theories! ‘Meow’ Hm, that didn’t work. But at least you look warm, curled up on top of my computer tower—oh wait, I’m still making inferences based on the prediction that temperature evens out, which comes from my theory!--so I guess you might be freezing for all I know)
Your comments will be a bit easier to read if you use > to start quoted text. (Make sure to leave a line separating them and your response, or they’ll be part of the same paragraph.)
OK, I am sorry I responded to your insulting post in kind. I was afraid it would come to this. First I am accused of trolling. Not being serious and not understanding. Now insulting responses.
I have learned to expect this when I challenge religious folks beliefs, I didn’t expect it from this community.
However, I can take and dish it out -if that’s what you want. Otherwise. I call truce.
You might still love this community, if you stick around, given your intellectual openness.
And you have a good point about the accidental inventions.
However, my point about theory—well, it’s so basic that it can’t really be denied. The transistor may have been invented by accident, but if the scientists didn’t have theories about how things worked, they couldn’t possibly have messed around with things in the right away to come up with accidental inventions on top of purposeful inventions. Like I said, if you truly had no theories, you mineswell stick your cat on top of your computer tower to make a transistor.
And I’m still puzzled about your response to Swimmer963′s comment. Do you really think that if a theory, that made no sense at all to you, but nevertheless made many successful predictions and was even the basis of a new technology, you still wouldn’t believe it? Because, if that’s so, then you’re just stupid. Your comments indicate you’re not actually that stupid.
That’s where I got the “you take intuition as the basis for accepting belief” comment, because your reply to her (I think Swimmer is female and has written posts on her) indicates that you do in fact take your intuition—“but that just can’t be”—over empirical demonstration.
As long as it doesn’t introduce any inconsistencies in the mathematical theory then sure. It’s a game with symbols that we can use to model real-world systems.
Hypotheses describe and theories explain. If they don’t make sense they are worthless!
Theories don’t explain- they predict. Consider gravity- Newton’s law tells you the attraction between two masses, and it’s mostly consistent with the mostly elliptical orbits that we observe the planets moving in.
But why does gravity exist? Why does it take that particular form? The theory is silent. It tells you how things will behave, but offers no further explanation.
If you can tell me how anything can have 0 dimensions in reality
So, electrons have mass, and charge, but as far as we can tell their radius is indistinguishable from zero. Does that count as 0 dimensions for you?
Theories don’t explain- they predict. Consider gravity- Newton’s law tells you the attraction between two masses, and it’s mostly consistent with the mostly elliptical orbits that we observe the planets moving in.
The gravitational equation is effectively just* a summary of the observed data, so it is no surprise that it predicts. I believe Monkeymind finds this unsatsifactory, but I’m still not sure exactly how. Perhaps he defines theory differently. I’m a little curious what actually causes the Earth to pull on me, rather than, say, push me away. At the time Newton said he had no hypothesis for that, but now the same equation constitutes a theory or explanation? I feel like these terms are used a little too loosely.
*Not to imply that finding the equation that fit the data wasn’t an important achievement
You can think of it this way: a good explanation lets us make many new predictions. And that is the sole use of explanation. (Does that sound too strong?)
EDIT: Really good explanations can be formulated mathematically, and from mathematical ‘laws’ you can derive predictions, as Desrtopa implies about Newton’s laws.
That’s the problem. Theories predict, but do not explain? What good is that?
… prediction?
I could care less that you tell me an apple falls at whatever ft per second per second.
The artillery captain cares strongly, not just the precise rate at which gravity occurs, but also the precise rate at which the world turns. And a nation whose shells land on target will conquer a nation whose shells miss their targets.
That is, you should care strongly about predictive success in any field personally relevant to you.
I want to know why.
Turn things around: what good is that? Suppose you knew why, but so broadly that it wouldn’t help you differentiate likely futures from unlikely futures (i.e. prediction). What could you do with that?
Something that is indistinguishable from zero just means that it is very small and approaching zero.
What’s the electrical charge of a neutron? How do you know?
If there is no L, W, or H then it has no dimensions. How can that exist except as a concept in some abstract mathematical model?
Edit: I misread what you wrote. To respond to what you actually said: are you doubting the existence of electrons?
I’ll wait and see what EY has to say about it, but honestly, I’m not very confident that he can make sense of arrows that point nowhere.
EY comments infrequently, so I would not hold out too much hope that he’ll address your concerns.
I suggest that you read the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions sequence, if not the whole thing, then posts 1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, and 11-18. If that sounds like a lot of reading to do, that’s because quite a lot of work has already gone into explaining the problems with the approach you’re suggesting.
OK, I will do this later today or tomorrow, but unless you wrote the article, I’m not sure we can properly address all the issues that may come up. I will relate everything that you throw at me directly back at this particular article. Already though that has it’s own probs. You told me you didn’t think that EY was talking about arrows that do not point anywhere. You said, in effect, that you weren’t sure. He might actually be saying that.
Will you address the posts I have made so far? I have gone to every link thus far, but I can see how I can potentially spend days, weeks or perhaps months and years, b4 ever getting back to my questions. I am a bit leary of all this because of my experiences. At 9 years old, I was tossed out of Vacation Bible School for asking “what about the dinosaurs” during the Adam and Eve story. My mom was called and I was sent home from school at age 12 for asking the teacher questions (Ha! math teacher BTW). And I was forced out of the military for not accepting (with very good reason) the party line about LOS microwave equipment. In all these instances, it was because I asked questions. I got no answers but was told I was being disruptive. In the first two cases, I literally got NO answers! In the last example, I was told to use ear plugs (no answers here either). They said that might eliminate the headaches the equipment was causing. Of course they didn’t know that I was communicating with the Turkish officers there on base who learning English to apply to the very same equipment. Our boys were being trained on the same faulty equipment that we sold the Turks and phasing out. Their gvnt told them this: The microwaves can cause HA’s, seizures, cancer, insanity and death. Now shut up an do your job!
So I hope you can see why I do not just accept authority blindly! I am not trying to be difficult. I just am, so it comes out that way!
Not accepting answers simply on authority is good. That’s one of the foundational ideas of science. But if scientists demonstrate an understanding that allows them to produce stuff that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to (and quantum theory definitely delivers on this count,) it’s worth taking the likelihood that they know what they’re talking about very seriously.
Some scientific subjects are difficult to understand, and take a lot of time and effort to build up to.
To quote from one of Eliezer’s other posts
Modern science is built on discoveries, built on discoveries, built on discoveries, and so on, all the way back to people like Archimedes, who discovered facts like why boats float, that can make sense even if you don’t know about other discoveries. A good place to start traveling that road is at the beginning.
Don’t be embarrassed to read elementary science textbooks, either. If you want to pretend to be sophisticated, go find a play to sneer at. If you just want to have fun, remember that simplicity is at the core of scientific beauty.
And thinking you can jump right into the frontier, when you haven’t learned the settled science, is like…
…like trying to climb only the top half of Mount Everest (which is the only part that interests you) by standing at the base of the mountain, bending your knees, and jumping really hard (so you can pass over the boring parts).
Don’t be so hasty to try and jump into the advanced stuff. It’s built on lots and lots of developments, and if you don’t take the time to understand those, it’s necessarily going to seem confusing, whether or not the people working on it really know what they’re talking about.
Ultimately all science has to eventually be used for prediction or it is useless except for aesthetic purposes. However, I do sympathize with what (I think) your main point was before, that prediction is no measure of a theory if the “theory” is just curve-fitting (it is, of course, a measure of the utility of the curve or equation that the data was fit to). That is really just common sense, though, so you may have meant something else.
If you have enough information, you can use Newton’s laws to predict when an apple will fall, or work out whether a bridge will stay up before you build it.
If we worked out this “why” you’re talking about, can you say what it would actually do for us?
Well, knowing what quantum theory tells us about light has allowed us to do a whole lot of stuff we weren’t able to do before, most prominently everything that we can do with lasers (which are not predicted to exist at all by classical theory, but were predicted advance by quantum theory, and then created because they had already been predicted, so researchers had an idea what to aim for.)
In any case, if you can’t give an example of any question and how you think scientists would have attempted to answer it compared to how you would have answered it, and why you think that would give superior results, why do you think you know better?
x
AND I don’t think I know better. I only suspect that the SM I am describing will get better results because the principals make better sense than what we are currently using.
But I want to elaborate on something I said about why questions. Been thinking about this the last few days, after being asked what good is knowing why.
You ask why and:
your parents say “Because I said so.”
your teachers say “because smart people say so”
your preachers say “because the bible says so.”
You get tired or maybe conditioned by this and so:
You stop asking the why questions.
If we had more of the why answers maybe the what questions would make more sense. Maybe we would have less what questions.
Whoah, thanks for this. I get what you’re saying now: you oppose Ptolemaic explanations. I think these are good points—why’s this sensible post being downvoted? Even if there is something wrong with the reasoning, these seem like good, interesting questions to me.
Einstein said one should be able to explain any theory to a barmaid and Feynman said if you can’t explain it to a 6 year old then you don’t understand it.
I hope they allow about 5 years for them to teach the prerequisite knowledge and allow the relevant neurological adaptations to get in place.
It is not that I am dull, it is that my questions and ideas are a threat to your religious world view.
You overestimate the threat that you pose. Your ideas are mostly harmless. Actually I believe having you here for a little bit was a net benefit to us. Trying to explain things across overwhelming inferential distance (and to people who are not @#%$@s) is useful. As is seeing other people attempting to do the same.
All the experimenting with imaginary numbers will not explain a thing about reality. It is relgion plain and simple.
Didn’t anyone tell you? We Believe that Eliezer is the reincarnation of Pythagoras come to share the Good News about imaginary numbers and complex amplitudes.
Well, I was going to describe a hypothesis and rationally explain a theory to you that answers all questions and unites everything. Yes, you heard right, a Grand Unified Theory....but my GUT tells me you prefer “point-less” discussions.
Teehee. You have a Grand Unified Theory that doesn’t use mathematics. That’s adorable.
As evidenced by his response to your comment, we are well into feeding-the-troll. Please stop.
I admit that this wasn’t clear earlier in the discussion, which made the conversation worthwhile. (especially when he agreed to consider the community argument for empiricism by reading the first sequence) But enough is enough.
Well, I hope it has been a benefit to some. I’m just testing ideas out and wanting to learn and I have learned some things… so great!
Judging from the lack of counterarguments, accusations, dodging, strawmen, shifting of goal posts, and so forth, the ideas I am sharing strike at the heart of folks belief system.
EDIT: What negative thumbs for leaving? I said I’ll be back. Just giving you a chance to gather your thought s so you can answer my questions next time. And when I get back, I’ll know far more than I do now. I’ll either be apologizing for being so dull, or ‘splainin’ why you are dull!
To be honest, you sound bitter or something, although given the difference of opinion being as radical as it is, that is pretty understandable (so are the downvotes, for the same reason). Maybe let it cool off for a bit. I have an interest in hearing what you think after you have spent more time here.
You remind me of Silas Barta, and I think we could use more people who radically disagree with major pieces of LW, because it is good practice if nothing else.
You remind me of Silas Barta, and I think we could use more people who radically disagree with major pieces of LW, because it is good practice if nothing else.
Monkeymind seems the very opposite of SilasBarta. SilasBarta often makes excellent points, if at times expressed in a more-obnoxious-than-necessary manner. Monkeymind, by contrast, is cordial enough, but has nothing to offer intellectually.
(Also, if Silas has radical disagreements with major pieces of LW, I haven’t noticed.)
Bluntly, I don’t think Monkeymind is worth your or LW’s time. They claim that science and mathematics are not used in designing or constructing technologies, reject scientific consensus on the grounds that the informal explanation is unintuitive, and purport to have discovered a (mathless) Grand Unified Theory. Disagreement can be handy, but it needs to be a little better thought out.
Hi Cu, and thanx! This is what I have been saying all along.
Maybe, I misunderstand what you mean by intuitive, so perhaps you should give your definition. If we wish to make an appeal to popularity, we can use this Google definition (which I have posted b4):
Intuition: Using or based on what one feels to be true even without conscious reasoning; instinctive.
Based on that definition, you can see clearly see that I have not been saying that at all. I have repeatedly said that in a hypothesis one must rationally define their key terms. It seems like you and others here are guilty of basing your “beliefs” on what you feel to be “true” based upon what you have been told, and not by actually applying the scientific method.
It is a shame that I have to repeat myself so often because folks refuse to actually read what I am saying.
Well, if you have a legit Theory of Everything, I’m sure we’ll hear about it someday. But if you mail it in to some professor and hear back that it’s got a three digit score on the crackpot index, well, you’d better be prepared for a hard trek to show why your theory of everything is better than the countless other theories of everything that get sent in to them every year.
I downvoted your post because it was long, rambling, and spilled over into a cascade of sub-posts which I didn’t read. However, if you re-wrote your post as an article, with proper headings (not to mention, narrative structure), I’d gladly read it.
Well then you missed the series of posts (the last few) that begin with:
“Well, I know that I said I would be back in a few months after learning more, but that will not be necessary. I have already learned enough to complete my analysis of Configurations and Amplitudes.
So today I wrote up a brief response based on what I currently understand about Double Slit and Half Silvered Mirror Experiments. Here it is in several posts.
What’s the matter?”
BTW, the post I was talking about was 13 sentences. I don’t know which one you are referring to. Anyways, try to respond to content not style. See if you can exterminate any of my posts, Bugmaster. I welcome it, as I’m here to learn, not defend some sort of belief system.
Your posts are very hard to read in this cascading thread format. If you formatted them as a top-level Discussion article, they’d be easier to absorb.
Your writing is rambling and disorganized. If you organized your words into blocks of several paragraphs each, with proper headings that follow a logical outline, then your point would be easier to grasp.
Your tone in general is very aggressive. You keep saying stuff like “do this !” and “don’t do that !”, but you’re not the boss of me. There’s nothing wrong with an aggressive tone per se, but it’s much easier to swallow when it’s backed up by some unimpeachable reasoning and evidence—of which you offer very little. Well, perhaps you do offer some, but I didn’t see it, because your posts are so hard to read (as per the previous two bullet points).
Thanx, Bugmaster for splainin your thumbs. It is appreciated. The cascading thread format is not my choice, I much prefer SMF over the blog post style, but that’s what we have to work with. You post and I respond, hence cascading posts.
My writing has been consistent throughout and very organized, which you would know had you taken the time to read them. It took all the posts up until today to get folks to discuss my primary concern (from post one) defining key terms, because it is other members trying to divert the subject matter which is the experiment is flawed because the key terms are not defined or are inconsistent.
The aggressive tone is partially my style but partially stems from others accusing me of being a troll, thumbing me without explanation and refusing to stay on topic. No one has offered a single challenge to my content.
I do not know what you are referring to when you say that I am telling you to do this or not do that, but would like to point out that I was told by one member that I just don’t get it, and that I needed to read such and such if I was going to get any further discussion. I have complied with these demands and have read through dozens of EY’s posts. In fact, you’ll notice that I used quite a bit of his own words to illustrate some of the things that am trying to get across.
In stead of dealing with the issues that I have brought up, I get posts like the ones you are making dealing with style not content. It is your choice to read or not read what I am saying. I am not tied emotionally into the outcome at all, I came to learn about the half-silver mirror experiment and how it is related to SR, GR and QM. I originally thot this was a physics forum because of the topic. Now here you are telling me “You’re not the boss of me” and at the same time telling me how to compose my posts, so that you will read them. How about some counterarguments instead?
OK, I answered every single post addressed to me. I have done this since the beginning nearly one month ago. I have been honest, open and direct. I have tried to understand the community and I have done my best to respond with as much detail as needed to answer the issues raised.
No one has responded in kind. Therefore, Monday I will be back. If anyone needs clarification on anything that I have said, I will respond. Be prepared to answer my questions and address the issues I have raised by relating it directly to the OP (configurations & amplitudes). Otherwise I am done with this thread.
NOTE: the primary issue is defining the key terms related to the OP and dealing with the propagation of light as a particle/wave.
If you have a problem with mainstream physics, please take it up with physicists.
This is a site about the art and science of human rationality. This post was just a part of the Quantum Physics sequence, which was arguably tangential to the overall aims of the site. The author is not a physicist, and is merely reasoning using established math and physics.
I’m sure there are places on the Internet devoted to the discussion of physics. I believe your comments would be much more productive there.
You’re making a ton of interesting points, but please succinctify (a lot!). I mean, let people reply and stuff. I feel sorry for you writing all that knowing almost no one will see it. It’s obvious you’re reading LW classic posts and making discoveries, and then immediately turning around and applying them, which is great. I just think you’d do well to steep yourself in the posting norms of this forum so you can participate in a more fruitful way. Again, I for one would like to hear well-reasoned radical views.
The style of this comment is preferable to previous ones, but it is still too long and off-topic.
This looks like it might make a good blog post—though I would recommend your own blog rather than a discussion post here. A Tumblr is easy enough to set up, and then you could write a comment like “Detailed arguments [here] (link)”.
Although it is long, as it broadly covers many blogs in a sequence on how to change your mind, I disagree about it being off topic.
However, let me remind you that it is others that have kept it “off topic” not I. Others requested that I read other blogs in order that I might see more clearly where the author was coming from and the main thrust of Less Wrong.
Yet, it is not entirely off topic, it is just that we are dealing with a very broad subject, Quantum Mechanics, and attempting to approach it from a rationalist pov. The specific topic is Amplitudes and Configurations. The foundational principles of the experiment are flawed. I have attempted to point this out. We can return to the actual experiment once we have agreed on the basic assumptions.
Exactly! Wave is a verb, a dynamic concept implying motion and concepts can not move. ADDED: Adding ‘A’ in front of wave makes it appear it is a noun.
One does not need to be a physicist to understand that light is not ‘a’ wave.
There is a difference between an object and a concept. I keep saying this over and over, not because I think anyone is stupid. Because it can take months to understand (unlearn bad habbits). This is the MAIN prob with science in general and math and physics in particular.
BTW: dlthomas, I plussed you for helping me FINALLY get to the Thingy. Defining KEY TERMS!
“In physics, a wave is a disturbance or oscillation that travels through spacetime, accompanied by a transfer of energy. Wave motion transfers energy from one point to another, often with no permanent displacement of the particles of the medium—that is, with little or no associated mass transport. They consist, instead, of oscillations or vibrations around almost fixed locations. Waves are described by a wave equation which sets out how the disturbance proceeds over time. The mathematical form of this equation varies depending on the type of wave.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave
A disturbance that travels? A movement up and down? Neither of these is a noun. Motion is not an object it is a phenomena, a disturbance through a medium. (This is one reason why space is now supposedly not just a vacumn but some”thing” a medium which can be warped, or rippled).
C = f (frequency) x lambda (wavelength)
The physicist has defined frequency in regards to time and wavelength in regards to length. The math keeps frequency constant and light moving at different speeds through different mediums like glass, air, space, etc (refraction). So light accelerates from 200,000 to 300,00 kilometers per second when it passes from water to air. What causes this? No one has an answer! Newton’s third Law requires a force and Einstein (relativity) requires a curvature of space to deflect light. The solution offered is waves. Different mediums cause different resistance to the waves. So do these waves convert to particles when they reach a different medium?
Standing wave: Particles move up and down while wave moves through? Right! Imagine a rope tied to a tree on one end and you on the other. Move the rope up and down and watch the rope move in place as a motion “travels” along the length. Wait! the photon is supposed to be a traveling wave where the billiard balls move up and down as well as forward. What makes the billiard balls move up and down? Especially if they have no mass.
Wave motion transfers energy? Another important word! Energy is the ability to do work, that is, 1 J = 1 W s = 1 kg m^2/s^2.
A motion transfers the ability to do work! A motion moves a motion. Right! Another misuse of the English language. Another example of not knowing the difference between objects and concepts, nouns and verbs!
Do you also object to saying that a surfer is riding “a wave”? Motion is not an object, but a particular pattern of motion can be: a wave, an eddy, a tornado...
No, not if we are talking like a couple of buds on the beach observing a surfer over a couple of beers (and he can shoot the curl all he wants). However when we are talking scientific hypothesis or theory, we have to be using unambiguous, non-contradictory, precisely defined terms that can be used consistently throughout a discussion. If Amplitudes and Configurations wants to use key terms, they need to be defined in this way. I provided definitions from wiki and Wolfram. If one reads through the scientific literature (and I previously listed all the major scientists in chronological order) ones sees that the term wave is used inconsistently. This is why each theorist must define his own key terms (the ones his hypothesis or theory depend upon).
Wave/particle paradox is irrational because it is contradictory and illogical. That alone should raise flags and eyebrows!
Oh and BTW the ocean wave you are referring to are water molecules moving up and down!
The theme in my posts all along has been about defining key terms and proper scientific method. We can’t have one without the other. Here is another perfect example of what I have been talking about, when I say proper scientific method.
In the Strange Case of Solar Flares and Radioactive Elements, when the scientists can’t understand how their observations don’t align with their theories, instead of taking a closer look at the assumptions of the theories, they naturally want to invent another particle! (In general, I am pointing to the problem with the Scientific Method. In particular, I am relating this to the back and forth of wave to particle to wave to particle and finally landing on particle/wave duality).
Because of seasonal variations, researchers think that solar flares may be interfering with the rate of decay of radioactive isotopes on earth (which are supposed to be constant).
“It doesn’t make sense according to conventional ideas,” Fischbach said. Jenkins whimsically added, “What we’re suggesting is that something that doesn’t really interact with anything is changing something that can’t be hanged.”
If the mystery particle is not a neutrino, “It would have to be something we don’t know about, an unknown particle that is also emitted by the sun and has this effect, and that would be even more remarkable,” Sturrock said.
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/august/sun-082310.html
Remind you of anything? 0D photons and waves that travel don’t make sense based upon the math and observations, so therefore let’s invent the particle/wave paradox. Now, instead of questioning the assumptions of QM, researchers are assuming a new particle in order to make sense of something which does not make sense. QM says that nothing can affect the rate of decay of isotopes.
Uhuh, thanx for the thumb down, mystery person. Don’t worry about it… the physicists don’t have counterarguments either!
Wave/particle duality is irrational because the language is grammatically incorrect and contradictory (as I have explained repeatedly).
The half silvered mirror experiment, and the double slit experiment are unscientific. The theory they are based upon uses abstract dynamic mathematical language to describe imaginary static objects confusing objects with concepts, instead of illustrating the objects in the hypothesis and explaining the phenomena in the theory as required by the scientific method.
The actual phenomena is simple diffraction caused by destructive wave interference and was properly understood hundreds of years ago.
The particle wave paradox is illogical, because it violates the three Laws of Logic.
Finally, the Lunar Laser Ranging stations in Texas and in New Mexico clearly show the impossibility of light leaving as a photon, traveling as a wave, and arriving as a photon. Therefore, I have shown without any counterargument that Amplitudes and Configurations is nothing but smoke and mirrors.
I think you are fighting a strawman here. By using the word “wave” physicists are not suggesting that something moves along a sinusoidal path. That was your intepretation, an incorrect one, and you have successfully disproved it, which is great. Just please don’t assume that physicists are doing the same mistake.
When you look at the waves on the water, yes, there is a kind of sinusoidal shape. But the word “wave” in physics means that at some places the density of something is higher, and at other places, the density is lower, and the map of the densities looks and moves… well, like the waves on the water.
The waves on the water make a sinusoidal shape, because there is an air above the water, so the higher density of water creates a “wave” in a layman’s meaning of the word. But imagine an explosion deep below the ocean surface, and how the density of the surrounding water changes in time. This is also called “waves” in physics, but there is nothing moving along the sinusoidal path. Similarly, sound makes “waves” (areas of different density) in the air. And a photon also makes some kind of a “wave” (some its properties measured in space and time show the same kind of pattern).
Instead of talking about details, I’d like to remind you of the big picture.
You think physicists get it wrong and you get it right. That is not completely impossible. However, based on the theories of physicists we have a lot of stuff that works: planes that fly, microwaves that heat, GPS devices that measure your position. So if their theories are wrong, how do you explain that all this stuff, built on their theories, works? Their theories, if not completely correct, must be at least approximately correct, or mathematically equivalent to correct, right? So even if they make errors, they surely do not make obvious errors. However, what you write, suggests that there is a big difference. How is it possible, if you are right, that a theory so different from yours can still produce all the stuff that works?
(To compare, LW contains a few discussions on many-worlds hypothesis versus collapse hypothesis, but those two are mathematically equivalent. In other case, an experiment could be done that decides between them, and someone would probably have done it decades ago.)
So if their theories are wrong, how do you explain that all this stuff, built on their theories, works?
In short, the hypothesis User:Monkeymind advanced (somewhere in that rambling mess) was that engineers do not base their technological work on math, but instead on trial-and-error. This is obviously an empirical question. Monkeymind offered as evidence that he himself has a bad grasp of mathematics and yet has built various devices using trial-and-error.
It’s a potentially interesting idea. Do we have any real evidence that mathematics is a necessary component of the development of these devices? Anecdotally Norbert Wiener used mathematics to shoot down Japanese planes using radar.
Not that we have a really good alternative. Physical theories have been preferred for being more mathematically elegant ever since Newton, and before that we didn’t really have physical theories. I think that Monkeymind’s insistence that science is not for making predictions might be a hint that we’re just talking about different things here.
Agreed, it’s not definitive. The best way to answer this would probably be to round up a bunch of engineers and ask them how much they use math. That would give us a quick average estimate of how today’s engineers use math. Unless you’re interested in specific important discoveries in engineering, in which case it would make more sense to examine the most influential breakthroughs case-by-case.
I personally am a programmer, but the software I write (as well as other software, written by smarter people) is used by genetic engineers. They engineer plants for specific desired traits (stronger drought resistance, bigger fruit, whatever). To do this, they use a ton of conventional math (statistics, specifically), as well as numerical optimization methods (such as neural networks) in order to determine (simplistically speaking) which nucleotides on the genome have an effect on which trait.
A single chromosome of corn consists of about 200,000,000 nucleotides. Good luck with that trial and error !
Yes, and a grain of rice has more genetic material than a human (almost double). So what?
With the simple understanding of emergent complexity, and without any automata or math at all, I can tell you (predict) what any plant or animal will look like on a mountain above 14k feet, or in a tundra. It is because there are only a few configurations for plants or animals in those conditions. We know this because we have observed it over and over again. So I can predict various life forms quite easily.
Although an electron microscope and a great deal of programming was needed at various stages, Craig Venter’s Synthetic Genomics has synthesized an e-coli bacteria. Using four chemicals they created a synthetic bacterial chromosome and used yeast to assemble the gene sequences. They were copying nature, not actually creating anything from scratch. Lots and lots of trial and error was involved. Watch his press conference and let him tell you himself. Professor Cronin of Glascow University has created self replicating, evolving inorganic (metal-based) iCHELLS almost entirely by trial and error mixing.
I’m very excited about their accomplishments and have corresponded with both of them to let them know. I’m not knocking science or those respectable persons involved in the scientific process, I merely want to help make it better.
I am not for getting rid of theory and replacing it with trial and error. Try to actually read what I have written in toto instead of taking a few phrases out of context.
In short, the hypothesis User:Monkeymind advanced (somewhere in that rambling mess) was that engineers do not base their technological work on math, but instead on trial-and-error.
A hypothesis that collapses into category-erroneous incoherence as soon as you realize that math can also be done via trial-and-error.
With minus 373 Karma points for the last 30 days under your belt, I think you should take a hint and stop posting. If this comment is upvoted/not convincingly disputed (by others), I’m going to start removing some of the worse comments you make in the near future.
Please crack down earlier, harder, and more often. Nobody is going to die from it. Higher average comment quality will attract better commenters in a virtuous circle. There’s no excuse for tolerating the endless nonsense that some commenters post, and those enabling them by responding to them should stop.
those enabling them by responding to them should stop.
This seems to be the main problem, but my recent attempts to discourage those who make high-quality contributions to hopeless or malignant conversations didn’t stir much enthusiasm, so it’d probably take a lot of effort to change this.
(A specific suggestion I have is to establish a community norm of downvoting those participating in hopeless conversations, even if their contributions are high-quality.)
Please crack down earlier, harder, and more often.
This is something new for LW, in fact this appears to be the first time when a non-Eliezer moderator stepped forward to implement this measure (in this case prompted by Eliezer’s recent statement that deleting posts by a chronically downvoted user who doesn’t stop is to be considered a general policy).
This is the first time I’ve come across the suggestion to downvote well-thought-out contributions to silly conversations, actually, and I like it. I’ll keep that in mind.
A specific suggestion I have is to establish a community norm of downvoting those participating in hopeless conversations, even if their contributions are high-quality
How do you define “hopeless”, exactly ? Sometimes, a high-quality post in response to a troll’s or idiot’s thread can be quite helpful to other readers (and lurkers), who aren’t trolls or idiots, but who are just misinformed or new to the topic. I personally have been such a lurker on several sites, but I do acknowledge that my personal experience is not statistically significant.
Just a few reasons: Removing comments happens silently and without a trace. Such tools can be used by the establishment to quiet dissent. They can break existing conversations. We need more contrarians, not fewer. By removing examples of what not to do, we can no longer point at them as examples. Even if the comments were on the whole annoying, there might be interesting stuff in there worth responding to. Bans, more than downvotes, outright discourage participation amongst those who are in particular need of our help. Freedom of speech is valuable in itself, and its presence here is aesthetically pleasing.
The current procedure: (1) banning mode is only triggered by a user systematically accumulating some crazy amount of negative Karma quickly, (2) you get an explicit statement of banning-mode having been triggered, where others can appeal/discuss the decision, (3) you are free to continue participating if you somehow manage to produce the kind of comments that don’t get downvoted (so it’s more of a parole). In no other cases do the comments get banned.
Yes, and it’s carried out by Vladimir_Nesov and his ilk, which makes me not worry at all about the application in this particular case. I still needed to register my general objection, and I fear for our children’s children who might suffer under an oppressive fascist regime based on the Less Wrong moderation policy.
If this is where we are at, then please advise me of it so I can take appropriate steps to avoid getting banned.
I don’t think I got an explicit statement of banning mode having been triggered, but I want to be sure since there is talk of the ban hammer going down.
I am not trying to be contrary, I just am, so it comes out that way. I truly think that what I have to offer has merit. Of course, if the community does not think so then it is within their power to down vote me into non-existence. That is fair, as I have no right to force my ideas on another person. It just seemed that this would be a place to share ideas. Perhaps not.
The “statement of triggering the banning mode” is this. The steps to avoid triggering it (in your case, to get out of it) are here. This is the conversation where the procedure is getting established.
Removing comments happens silently and without a trace. Such tools can be used by the establishment to quiet dissent.
So let’s have a policy that banned commenters get to post a link to their anti-LW blog. We could list all the anti-LW blogs on a wiki page or something.
They can break existing conversations.
By removing examples of what not to do, we can no longer point at them as examples.
I don’t think anyone is proposing to delete past comments.
We need more contrarians, not fewer.
If I promise to be a high-quality contrarian, can we ban the next five low-quality contrarians?
discourage participation amongst those who are in particular need of our help
This is a good thing. LW’s positive impact is likely to lie mostly in building an effective movement, figuring out what issues are important, and pushing on those issues; all of these are helped by a high average level of rationality. LW’s positive impact is unlikely to lie in trying to fix whatever hopeless cases wander by.
Freedom of speech is valuable in itself, and its presence here is aesthetically pleasing.
I disagree on both counts, and I suspect your other arguments may be rationalizations springing from this value judgement.
I’m generally in favor of more contrarians on LW, but a commenter who rejects empiricism across the board and cannot make any comments trying to understand the arguments in favor of empiricism adds no value here—especially if rejecting empiricism is all he is willing to talk about AND his comments dominate the sidebar for days.
In short, banning is a reasonable measure in this case. That said, I agree with your general points below.
...but a commenter who rejects empiricism across the board and cannot make any comments trying to understand the arguments in favor of empiricism adds no value here...
You are probably right about this particular case, but I’d hesitate to generalize it to all possible cases. I personally would find it quite interesting to engage in conversation (or debate) with a staunch anti-empiricist, assuming such a thing was even possible. I have talked to a few anti-empiricists before, and I find their position fascinating… listening to them feels like getting a glimpse of an utterly alien mind.
If you’ll start a discussion topic or a thread somewhere on the issue, I’ll argue against empiricism. We should trade understandings of what we take empiricism to be first though. Let me know if you’re game.
I’m totally game, but I am unskilled in the ways of LW. How do I “start a discussion topic” ? I thought that discussion topics had to be full-fledged articles, according to LW etiquette. I could probably sum up my position in a few bullet points, but I don’t think I have a full article’s worth of material.
But I could be overthinking the whole deal, let me know if that’s the case.
Alternatively, y’all could just have this conversation offline, via email or PM. If it turns out to be valuable, you could turn the conversation into an article.
I guess you could start an article in the discussion section? I don’t know the etiquette very well here either.
The empiricist claim that I would attack is one which says something like this: we have two ways of coming to know something. First, we come to know things by making inferences from other things we already know, and second we come to know things by direct experience of them. The second way, direct experience, is of something like sense-data. At root, everything else we come to know, we come to know by way of sense-data, and our access to sense-data is independent of whatever we infer from it.
That’s the view that I’d attack. I think any theory of empiricism weaker than that isn’t really distinctively empiricist, or distinguishable from, say, many versions of coherentism. But I’d be willing to debate that too.
That sounds like a good starting point to me. We could discuss this via PM, as TheOtherDave suggested; this way, if our discussion turns out to be nothing but noise, we would at least spare the other LWers the aggravation. Alternatively, I could create a discussion post containing the above paragraph, and my response, and we could go from there.
Both of these approaches sound good to me, so let me know what you want to do and I’ll get crackin’… by which I mean, I will write up a response when I have time :-/
On the contrary, the karma system exists in order to make such “cracking down” unnecessary. If comments are downvoted sufficiently, they are hidden. This system is supposed to replace moderator action. If moderators are going to control content then we may as well not have voting.
I’m speaking up in this instance in particular because it seems to me that the only problem with the commenter in question is an intellectual one. The person isn’t behaving badly in any sense other than arguing for an incorrect view and not noticing the higher level of their opponents (which after all can hardly be expected). It’s exactly the kind of thing that downvotes alone are supposed to handle. We’re not talking about a troll or spammer.
The reason it’s important to make this distinction is that censoring for purely viewpoint-based reasons is a Rubicon that we need not cross.
(EDIT: I’ll also point out, for clarity, that I myself have not responded to any of Monkeymind’s comments. Being opposed to banning a commenter is not to be confused with being in favor of engaging them.)
True, but it would discriminate less well. It would hide many OK comments that happened to be downvoted once or twice.
Note that for this solution to be an argument against the banning solution, it would need to actually be implemented. Are you predicting that will happen?
I’m saying it ought to be done, if the problem is as described. Or, in other words, that I prefer such a solution over the alternative being proposed (moderator intervention to remove comments).
There are some corpses in the street. Some people are proposing to bury them, because they’ll rot and cause diseases. Others are proposing to leave them there, because haha, corpses. In this situation, you may prefer cryopreservation to burial and at the same time prefer burial to non-burial, because cryo probably won’t happen. (Maybe this is an insane alien hypothetical world where cryo is just really unpopular.) If you’re facing a “bury yes or no” button, it may well be rational to push yes. This is true even though the probability of cryopreservation depends on your preferences. Now substitute bad commenters for corpses, banning for burial, and sidebar change for cryo. I’m not saying the parameter values are the same, but do you agree with the qualitative point?
I agree with the qualitative point but think it irrelevant. Not only are we not facing a “yes or no” button, but all that you claim in the above is that it “may well be rational to push yes” (emphasis added) in the event that we are faced with such a button. This says very little.
Again, I reiterate the point made in the grandparent. A hypothetical about a yes-or-no button is no answer to someone specifically advocating a third alternative. If you don’t think the third alternative is possible, argue against it directly; don’t pretend it was never proposed.
The question isn’t whether it “exists in order to” make cracking down unnecessary, or whether it “is supposed to” replace moderator action. The question is whether it actually does those things. And it’s far from perfect at doing them. Yes, heavily downvoted comments take up a little less space in the recent comments and in the thread (at least if you have the willpower not to click on them! virtue of curiosity!) But they still take up some space; they take time to be downvoted enough to be hidden; I’m pretty sure they still appear in the sidebar; and the responses to them tend to appear in full, even though these too tend to be valueless. On a more abstract level, I’m worried that such comments influence a collective sense of what the current topic of the site is.
There are intellectual problems other than arguing for the wrong views, and ways of being ban-worthy other than being a troll or spammer. I haven’t read most of the exchanges, but it was certainly my impression that Monkeymind has been communicating in ways that downvotes had made very clear weren’t working for the audience, that he’s been reasoning badly, and that he’s been responding with hostility to downvotes. Are you sure that nobody has been banned for such behavior previously, and that a genuine Rubicon is being crossed here?
If the current system is so perfect that the comments being banned weren’t attracting any attention anyway, is it really a big additional problem for them to be censored?
At the risk of exposing myself to a severe dose of negative karma, I have to say I don’t agree with that approach. This is supposed to be a blog devoted to the art of refining human rationality. If we crack down on people too heavily and too early on, before explaining why we disagree with them, I think it defeats the entire purpose of the blog. What would the point be if we just ostracized people who are not already on board with the Less Wrong view of rationality before explaining why we believe that our own approach is the best approach?
He’s making some interesting points, and he gets extra credit in my view for taking so radical a view while usually remaining reasonable. I find his railing against prediction to be puzzling, but his semantic points and discussion of Ptolemaic explanations have given me a lot to think about.
I also noticed that even some of his friendly, reasoned posts were being downvoted to the same extreme negative levels, which seems unwarranted. He has posted too much without familiarizing himself with the norms here, but he shows sincerity and willingness to learn and adapt. He got a little testy a few times, but he also apologized a lot.
All in all, with a few notable exceptions, it looks like he is getting downvoted mainly for unfamiliarity with LW posting style and for disagreeing with “settled science” (I myself am not too partial to that term). Perhaps also for some unconventional spellings and other idiosyncrasies.
I’m open to being corrected on this, but I think I have read this entire thread and I am pretty sure Monkeymind is not deliberately trolling. High inferential distance feels like trolling so often that it’s almost a forum trope. I myself am enjoying some of his posts and the responses.
I’ll change my mind if he continues with the present posting style, though.
If you prefer not having disagreement, I’ll just have to read and not participate. I can’t simply agree because others think differently. Surely that is not what this is about.
But that’s mostly a technicality; the correct interpretation/application of the theorem is of some controversy, you’re not obliged to expect us to be rational truthseeking agents, and I don’t think you can rationally expect us to expect you to be a rational truthseeking agent in any event.
BTW, I will go by whatever the house rules are. I am not here to be argumentative or disagreeable. I am here to learn. I do not argue for the sake of argument. I argue to become Less Wrong!
Originally I thot this was a physics forum. I came to this thread and got into the discussion w/o reading through the website. My bad! I have tapped out of the thread and will leave it alone. If you must censor me can you please delete all my posts, to be fair. It is hard enough to get people not to take things out of context as it is.
I’m asking you to not make comments that get downvoted (yes, it’s a confusing hard-to-comply-with rule). Since this currently seems to be most of them, a good heuristic is to almost completely stop commenting and switch to the lurker-mode for at least a few months.
“To compare, LW contains a few discussions on many-worlds hypothesis versus collapse hypothesis, but those two are mathematically equivalent. In other case, an experiment could be done that decides between them, and someone would probably have done it decades ago.”
Math can, and in the case of QM, must use infinities and 0-dimensional particles which can not exist in reality.
One can describe Hilbert’s Hotel with infinite rooms, but construction of one is impossible. One can mathematically divide in half infinitely, but can not walk halfway to a wall forever. Math can do many things that reality can not.
Math can, and in the case of QM, must use infinities and 0-dimensional particles which can not exist in reality.
I’m a little confused by this objection to say the least. Could you express your views on the following topics in mathematics, particularly when they are used for real world applications, whether it be physics, computer science or engineering?
The use of the “null vector” in linear algebra
Limits approaching 0 in calculus
Generalizing the rules of 3 dimensional space to represent 4 dimensional space
Complex numbers and their various applications, particularly if you think we shouldn’t use the square root of negative one if it has no identifiable physical properties
Even so, shadow puppets falsify the theory of light. If your hand stops light, it shows that light is some”thing” and therefore can not be a massless 0D particle or a stream of 0D particles.
Made my morning. Overall, I know what your posts most remind me of.
x
I understand why you think so, since your species evolved with sensors that work at a particular macro level, and so intuitively you expect everything in reality to work the same way. It does not make sense to you that the same rules don’t apply if you go really really fast, or if you’re looking at something really really big or really really tiny, or if you’re observing a process over a very short or very long time scale.
Sadly, this is a design flaw in your brain. You will not likely be able to rework your intuitions so that reality always “makes sense”. Reality doesn’t have to conform to your preconceptions, and your brain just isn’t made to radically transform itself like that.
Luckily, you can choose to use a mechanism other than human intuition to understand the universe. Like mathematics, which seems to do a much better job, even in a way observable to humans. We have lots of devices (observable at human scales!) that do exactly what the mathematics said they would, like GPS.
But despair not! It’s not completely a lost cause. Even though we are not made to understand things directly using math all the time, there are ways of retraining your intuitions to some extent, and correcting for your design flaws in other ways where that’s not possible. Figuring out how to do that is the primary mission of this site.
I think there is a common miscommunication on this point. If something cannot be understood in the conventional human sense, can it be understood via math? It depends on what we mean by “understand.” We can certainly catalog what we observe and summarize those data in the form of mathematical formulae and models.
However, if those are merely very succinct summaries, it is no surprise that they make accurate predictions, as they would effectively just be extrapolating from the observed data. It also seems unsatisfying to call that a theory in the traditional sense, if it is really more like curve-fitting.
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Both of them were pretty good at explaining things, as scientists went, but this is a serious exaggeration as far as the actual comprehensibility of the theories goes. The six most accessible chapters from the Feynman Lectures on Physics, republished separately as Six Easy Pieces, are still way over the head of an ordinary six year old, and the Theory of Relativity was famously little understood in its time. I recall reading one anecdote by a contemporary where he says that he spent several days with Einstein, and every day Einstein tried to explain the theory to him. He said that by the end of it, he still couldn’t make head or tails of it but was convinced Einstein knew what he was talking about.
Some theories in physics today are genuinely very difficult to understand, and take a lot of focused study to make sense of. I was accounted a pretty promising student in physics, and dropped the subject after a year in college, and a lot of stuff was still way over my head by the time I switched tracks. But the reason they actually believe these theories, and consider them theories rather than simply conjectures, is that they’re very well supported by evidence. They’re unintuitive and hard to understand, but it appears that they’re actually true regardless.
Human beings never faced evolutionary selection pressure towards being able to understand the most fundamental workings of reality. There’s no particular reason they should be easy for us to understand.
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It was never “true” that the earth was flat. Obviously the earth was round before people figured out that it was round, but there were no experiments which “confirmed” that the earth was flat. The earth was demonstrated to be round by experiment in the third century BC, and we have no evidence of any experiments predating that which indicated otherwise. The roundness of the earth was not discovered by the “common sense” of ships vanishing over the horizon.
Experiments showed that the earth was round, to within a small margin of error. Further discoveries showed that, within that margin of error, it was not perfectly round. At each step, experiments advanced our knowledge, rather than misleading us. There is actually a specific coined term for the position you’re arguing, using the same argument, and this is it.
Common sense has lost out quite a lot in science. Einstein himself, for instance, criticized quantum mechanical models, arguing that if they were true, we would expect nonsensical things like quantum entanglement, so we should be pretty sure that the models were wrong. Unfortunately, reality came back with a resounding “screw you Einstein, quantum entanglement is totally a thing.”
Math, on the other hand, has a much better track record. We do not have a history of mathematically proving that something should never happen, for instance, and reality comes back and says “tough, I’m doing it anyway.” We have a track record of working out mathematical formulas that work when you apply them to abstract numbers, and then when we use mathematical models to try and make predictions about the real world, they actually work. Do you know how black holes were discovered? First, people did the math, based on our models of physical law, and found that if you plug the numbers in, if you pack enough matter together, black holes are what you get. It wasn’t until years later that we made the observations that showed that black holes really do exist.
This is why scientists use mathematical models of reality, not just “common sense.” It works. If it were easier than common sense explanation, we would have been doing this thousands of years ago, but it’s not. And so the people who have computers, satellites, phones and airplanes, are us, the people living in a civilization founded on the fruits of science, and not the human race preceding the advent of science. It’s hard to argue with consistent, reliable results.
Well said. Personally, I prefer this argument for science.
You know, that comic has always bugged me a bit. The quantum electrodynamics bit makes sense, but I see no way all that GPS devices are dependent on relativity to work. To get them to work right, we have to design them to account for the predictions of relativity, rather than just classical mechanics, but if the universe ran on classical mechanics rather than relativity, I can’t see any way in which it would prevent us from creating GPS devices; it seems to me that it would be even easier.
Relativity has loads of experimental support, but unless you count nuclear energy, which was already observed before the advent of the theory of relativity, if not explained, then I’m stuffed for examples on how industry’s benefited from it being true.
Relativity works describing reality, so companies are making a killing using it to build accurate GPS devices. A bit more roundabout than some of the others, but doesn’t seem “wrong”.
But unlike all the others, if Relativity weren’t true, they’d still be able to do that. They’d just do it by not incorporating the predictions of Relativity.
If electricity worked by classical models, we wouldn’t be building semiconductor circuits differently, we wouldn’t be able to build them at all. All the others could be implemented for initiatives that would be possible if they were real, but impossible otherwise, so Relativity is the odd one out.
There are doubtless other models by which electricity could hypothetically work that would allow circuits that do interesting things. I don’t see where the focus on specific “classical models” is drawn from.
I did not know that the GPS—relativity connection was wrong. Thanks.
Well it’s not so much that the connection was wrong. It just didn’t fit the pattern of “If this were real, people would be making a lot of money from it”. Because relativity doesn’t make GPS easier or cheaper. It’s just that if relativity were false, our GPS systems would be constructed differently.
Failing to fit the pattern counts as wrong. The comic I cited is making an implicit assertion that that pattern holds, and this assertion is wrong.
Yeah, the comic seems to be missing the mark there.
Still, if we designed them to work taking into account relativity, and the universe ran on classical mechanics, then they would not work.
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I almost typed out a long reply to this, but honestly, that would have been pointless. You are making the same mistakes, not simple points of disagreement, but very obvious and demonstrable mistakes, over and over. Please read the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions sequence before replying to any more of my comments, if you want me to respond.
OK, I will. I told you I would, but I have to answer all the responses. I will do that regardless of weather I think it is pointless, because I think it is respecting the forum.
But it would be helpful if you point out my mistakes. What if I read all this stuff and then still make the same “mistakes.” How will I ever know?
I am beginning to think it is a diversion. 2morrow I will read it all and I will be back.
If you continue to make the same mistakes after reading the sequence, the members here will continue to point them out, up to the limits of their patience.
Telling you to read the sequence is a diversion, in that while I could explain the same material myself given enough time, I would really rather not deal with responding to several simultaneous posts making the same mistakes over and over for the time it would take to cover all the material, given any alternative, and would much rather have the time to refresh my patience while you cover it on your own.
Good enough. Since I am demonstrating intellectual honesty and openess by reading everything you ask, can we agree to this? If I say I understand it but but that I disagree, will you then try to make the case for this half-silvered mirror experiment, or are we done?
Thank you for your patience. It is really appreciated.
I would ask you to explain the basis of your disagreement. If I felt like we were making any headway in mutual comprehension, I would be willing to make a case for the half-silvered mirror experiment, otherwise not.
The map is not the territory, and of course we can’t expect certainty in our map. That doesn’t mean the territory isn’t there; it just means we update our map as we find new things.
Suppose you have one theory that is very intuitive and easy to explain to a 6 year old but strongly conflicts with all of the experimental evidence you’ve collected, and another theory that is very counterintuitive and bizarre-looking but is heavily supported by the evidence. Which is more likely to be true? The second one, of course—when intuition conflicts with strong evidence, it generally means that your intuitions are flawed.
That’s essentially the situation we are in with respect to QM. It is clearly, obviously true given the evidence we’ve collected, and no amount of intuition can change that.
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That’s more or less what philosophers tended to do back in Classical Greece. Unfortunately, it doesn’t actually work very well.
The less information you have, the less good a position you’re in to come up with plausible hypotheses. If you try and draw a map of a city before you go out and see what the city actually looks like, your map will almost certainly be wrong. Experiments are the “go out and look” step.
What sounds to you like a rational hypothesis might be very obviously wrong to someone who’d actually made the relevant observations. You could end up doing a whole lot of work theorizing and putting together a coherent model, and then go out and do your experiments and find that your theory is completely wrong and gives you nothing useful to work with. You could have saved a lot of effort by going out and looking and finding what observations your theory needs to account for.
Drawing your conclusions before doing your experiments is not just putting the cart before the horse, it’s worse. It’s like putting the cart in front of the horse in a narrow alleyway where it’s a nightmare to get them turned around again. Humans naturally get fixated on and attached to explanations, and once you’ve latched onto an idea, it tends to affect how you view all the new information you get. By the time you raise an explanation to the level of attention, you really should have enough information to home in on that particular explanation out of the whole space of possibilities.
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I think you two may be talking past each other here. You clearly would do some observation before hypothesizing or theorizing, just perhaps not as much. I think the real difference between your positions lies in how you’re defining a theory or an explanation (as opposed to a description of appearances). The explanation that QM raised to a level of attention was not an explanation in the way you probably mean, but more like what you may call a description, like a summary of observations.
If someone had a theory that made useful predictions about the behaviour of reality, and could be used to make cool technology like transistors, and the only way you could get it to work and give those predictions was to assume the existence of hypothetical, mathematical square circles, who are you to call that theory “wrong” or “false”? The universe isn’t obligated to be easy for us to understand, any more than it’s obligated to be easy to understand for a mouse.
I would say the theory was poorly communicated, at best.
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I’m sorry, but historically speaking, this just isn’t true. See this page for details. Basically:
It was people in the lab who created transistors, using trial and error to get just the correct mix of elements in the semiconductor crystal, but they knew it was remotely possible because the math of quantum mechanics predicted (and this was already verified in experiment) that electrons could ‘tunnel through’ an apparently non-conductive barrier–thus ‘semiconductor’. According to classical understanding of the atom, this wouldn’t happen, and so no one would try making something like a transistor, by trial and error or by theoretical prediction or whatever.
You’re just wrong. You just got told how the theories you consider ‘worthless’ make correct predictions and allow us to build cool stuff. The theories which you allow ‘make sense’ make incorrect predictions. When your “Monkeymind” disagrees with the universe the universe wins and you lose.
“Are you going to tell me 0 dimensions make sense?” No, but we might ask you why you take intuition as the basis for accepting truth at all. That’s a pretty big implicit assumption you’re making.
“Theories didn’t make transistors. People did at Bell Labs with trial and error. Predictions had nothing to do with it. Math had nothing to do with it.” Ah. The people did it without theories, math, or predictions? I’d like to know more! Because I don’t know how one would go about constructing anything, e.g. a transistor, otherwise. You mineswell walk into a lab with equipment and randomly jam things together. (Heya, cat? ‘Meow’ Wanna help me build a transistor? ‘Meow’ Okay, let’s place you on top of this computer, maybe that will do something—I don’t know, because I don’t even theories! ‘Meow’ Hm, that didn’t work. But at least you look warm, curled up on top of my computer tower—oh wait, I’m still making inferences based on the prediction that temperature evens out, which comes from my theory!--so I guess you might be freezing for all I know)
Your comments will be a bit easier to read if you use > to start quoted text. (Make sure to leave a line separating them and your response, or they’ll be part of the same paragraph.)
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OK, I am sorry I responded to your insulting post in kind. I was afraid it would come to this. First I am accused of trolling. Not being serious and not understanding. Now insulting responses.
I have learned to expect this when I challenge religious folks beliefs, I didn’t expect it from this community.
However, I can take and dish it out -if that’s what you want. Otherwise. I call truce.
You might still love this community, if you stick around, given your intellectual openness. And you have a good point about the accidental inventions. However, my point about theory—well, it’s so basic that it can’t really be denied. The transistor may have been invented by accident, but if the scientists didn’t have theories about how things worked, they couldn’t possibly have messed around with things in the right away to come up with accidental inventions on top of purposeful inventions. Like I said, if you truly had no theories, you mineswell stick your cat on top of your computer tower to make a transistor.
And I’m still puzzled about your response to Swimmer963′s comment. Do you really think that if a theory, that made no sense at all to you, but nevertheless made many successful predictions and was even the basis of a new technology, you still wouldn’t believe it? Because, if that’s so, then you’re just stupid. Your comments indicate you’re not actually that stupid. That’s where I got the “you take intuition as the basis for accepting belief” comment, because your reply to her (I think Swimmer is female and has written posts on her) indicates that you do in fact take your intuition—“but that just can’t be”—over empirical demonstration.
As long as it doesn’t introduce any inconsistencies in the mathematical theory then sure. It’s a game with symbols that we can use to model real-world systems.
Theories don’t explain- they predict. Consider gravity- Newton’s law tells you the attraction between two masses, and it’s mostly consistent with the mostly elliptical orbits that we observe the planets moving in.
But why does gravity exist? Why does it take that particular form? The theory is silent. It tells you how things will behave, but offers no further explanation.
So, electrons have mass, and charge, but as far as we can tell their radius is indistinguishable from zero. Does that count as 0 dimensions for you?
The gravitational equation is effectively just* a summary of the observed data, so it is no surprise that it predicts. I believe Monkeymind finds this unsatsifactory, but I’m still not sure exactly how. Perhaps he defines theory differently. I’m a little curious what actually causes the Earth to pull on me, rather than, say, push me away. At the time Newton said he had no hypothesis for that, but now the same equation constitutes a theory or explanation? I feel like these terms are used a little too loosely.
*Not to imply that finding the equation that fit the data wasn’t an important achievement
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“Theories predict, but do not explain? What good is that?”
There’s a reason we ask new people to learn a little bit about the LW community before posting. Anticipation of experience as the measure of your belief is a fundamental concept here.
You can think of it this way: a good explanation lets us make many new predictions. And that is the sole use of explanation. (Does that sound too strong?)
EDIT: Really good explanations can be formulated mathematically, and from mathematical ‘laws’ you can derive predictions, as Desrtopa implies about Newton’s laws.
… prediction?
The artillery captain cares strongly, not just the precise rate at which gravity occurs, but also the precise rate at which the world turns. And a nation whose shells land on target will conquer a nation whose shells miss their targets.
That is, you should care strongly about predictive success in any field personally relevant to you.
Turn things around: what good is that? Suppose you knew why, but so broadly that it wouldn’t help you differentiate likely futures from unlikely futures (i.e. prediction). What could you do with that?
What’s the electrical charge of a neutron? How do you know?
Edit: I misread what you wrote. To respond to what you actually said: are you doubting the existence of electrons?
EY comments infrequently, so I would not hold out too much hope that he’ll address your concerns.
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I suggest that you read the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions sequence, if not the whole thing, then posts 1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, and 11-18. If that sounds like a lot of reading to do, that’s because quite a lot of work has already gone into explaining the problems with the approach you’re suggesting.
OK, I will do this later today or tomorrow, but unless you wrote the article, I’m not sure we can properly address all the issues that may come up. I will relate everything that you throw at me directly back at this particular article. Already though that has it’s own probs. You told me you didn’t think that EY was talking about arrows that do not point anywhere. You said, in effect, that you weren’t sure. He might actually be saying that.
Will you address the posts I have made so far? I have gone to every link thus far, but I can see how I can potentially spend days, weeks or perhaps months and years, b4 ever getting back to my questions. I am a bit leary of all this because of my experiences. At 9 years old, I was tossed out of Vacation Bible School for asking “what about the dinosaurs” during the Adam and Eve story. My mom was called and I was sent home from school at age 12 for asking the teacher questions (Ha! math teacher BTW). And I was forced out of the military for not accepting (with very good reason) the party line about LOS microwave equipment. In all these instances, it was because I asked questions. I got no answers but was told I was being disruptive. In the first two cases, I literally got NO answers! In the last example, I was told to use ear plugs (no answers here either). They said that might eliminate the headaches the equipment was causing. Of course they didn’t know that I was communicating with the Turkish officers there on base who learning English to apply to the very same equipment. Our boys were being trained on the same faulty equipment that we sold the Turks and phasing out. Their gvnt told them this: The microwaves can cause HA’s, seizures, cancer, insanity and death. Now shut up an do your job!
So I hope you can see why I do not just accept authority blindly! I am not trying to be difficult. I just am, so it comes out that way!
Not accepting answers simply on authority is good. That’s one of the foundational ideas of science. But if scientists demonstrate an understanding that allows them to produce stuff that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to (and quantum theory definitely delivers on this count,) it’s worth taking the likelihood that they know what they’re talking about very seriously.
Some scientific subjects are difficult to understand, and take a lot of time and effort to build up to.
To quote from one of Eliezer’s other posts
Don’t be so hasty to try and jump into the advanced stuff. It’s built on lots and lots of developments, and if you don’t take the time to understand those, it’s necessarily going to seem confusing, whether or not the people working on it really know what they’re talking about.
I think your position is just too radical here.
Ultimately all science has to eventually be used for prediction or it is useless except for aesthetic purposes. However, I do sympathize with what (I think) your main point was before, that prediction is no measure of a theory if the “theory” is just curve-fitting (it is, of course, a measure of the utility of the curve or equation that the data was fit to). That is really just common sense, though, so you may have meant something else.
If you have enough information, you can use Newton’s laws to predict when an apple will fall, or work out whether a bridge will stay up before you build it.
If we worked out this “why” you’re talking about, can you say what it would actually do for us?
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Well, knowing what quantum theory tells us about light has allowed us to do a whole lot of stuff we weren’t able to do before, most prominently everything that we can do with lasers (which are not predicted to exist at all by classical theory, but were predicted advance by quantum theory, and then created because they had already been predicted, so researchers had an idea what to aim for.)
In any case, if you can’t give an example of any question and how you think scientists would have attempted to answer it compared to how you would have answered it, and why you think that would give superior results, why do you think you know better?
x AND I don’t think I know better. I only suspect that the SM I am describing will get better results because the principals make better sense than what we are currently using.
But I want to elaborate on something I said about why questions. Been thinking about this the last few days, after being asked what good is knowing why.
You ask why and: your parents say “Because I said so.” your teachers say “because smart people say so” your preachers say “because the bible says so.”
You get tired or maybe conditioned by this and so: You stop asking the why questions.
If we had more of the why answers maybe the what questions would make more sense. Maybe we would have less what questions.
This is a LessWrong idea two: play the why game, keep asking “why” all the way down. Can’t find the post on this though :/
Whoah, thanks for this. I get what you’re saying now: you oppose Ptolemaic explanations. I think these are good points—why’s this sensible post being downvoted? Even if there is something wrong with the reasoning, these seem like good, interesting questions to me.
I hope they allow about 5 years for them to teach the prerequisite knowledge and allow the relevant neurological adaptations to get in place.
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You overestimate the threat that you pose. Your ideas are mostly harmless. Actually I believe having you here for a little bit was a net benefit to us. Trying to explain things across overwhelming inferential distance (and to people who are not @#%$@s) is useful. As is seeing other people attempting to do the same.
Didn’t anyone tell you? We Believe that Eliezer is the reincarnation of Pythagoras come to share the Good News about imaginary numbers and complex amplitudes.
Teehee. You have a Grand Unified Theory that doesn’t use mathematics. That’s adorable.
As evidenced by his response to your comment, we are well into feeding-the-troll. Please stop.
I admit that this wasn’t clear earlier in the discussion, which made the conversation worthwhile. (especially when he agreed to consider the community argument for empiricism by reading the first sequence) But enough is enough.
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Is this still true?
Well, I hope it has been a benefit to some. I’m just testing ideas out and wanting to learn and I have learned some things… so great!
Judging from the lack of counterarguments, accusations, dodging, strawmen, shifting of goal posts, and so forth, the ideas I am sharing strike at the heart of folks belief system.
BYE!
EDIT: What negative thumbs for leaving? I said I’ll be back. Just giving you a chance to gather your thought s so you can answer my questions next time. And when I get back, I’ll know far more than I do now. I’ll either be apologizing for being so dull, or ‘splainin’ why you are dull!
To be honest, you sound bitter or something, although given the difference of opinion being as radical as it is, that is pretty understandable (so are the downvotes, for the same reason). Maybe let it cool off for a bit. I have an interest in hearing what you think after you have spent more time here.
You remind me of Silas Barta, and I think we could use more people who radically disagree with major pieces of LW, because it is good practice if nothing else.
Monkeymind seems the very opposite of SilasBarta. SilasBarta often makes excellent points, if at times expressed in a more-obnoxious-than-necessary manner. Monkeymind, by contrast, is cordial enough, but has nothing to offer intellectually.
(Also, if Silas has radical disagreements with major pieces of LW, I haven’t noticed.)
Bluntly, I don’t think Monkeymind is worth your or LW’s time. They claim that science and mathematics are not used in designing or constructing technologies, reject scientific consensus on the grounds that the informal explanation is unintuitive, and purport to have discovered a (mathless) Grand Unified Theory. Disagreement can be handy, but it needs to be a little better thought out.
I’m sorry the universe is unintuitive, but there are better ways of dealing with it.
Hi Cu, and thanx! This is what I have been saying all along.
Maybe, I misunderstand what you mean by intuitive, so perhaps you should give your definition. If we wish to make an appeal to popularity, we can use this Google definition (which I have posted b4):
Intuition: Using or based on what one feels to be true even without conscious reasoning; instinctive.
Based on that definition, you can see clearly see that I have not been saying that at all. I have repeatedly said that in a hypothesis one must rationally define their key terms. It seems like you and others here are guilty of basing your “beliefs” on what you feel to be “true” based upon what you have been told, and not by actually applying the scientific method.
It is a shame that I have to repeat myself so often because folks refuse to actually read what I am saying.
Well, if you have a legit Theory of Everything, I’m sure we’ll hear about it someday. But if you mail it in to some professor and hear back that it’s got a three digit score on the crackpot index, well, you’d better be prepared for a hard trek to show why your theory of everything is better than the countless other theories of everything that get sent in to them every year.
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I downvoted your post because it was long, rambling, and spilled over into a cascade of sub-posts which I didn’t read. However, if you re-wrote your post as an article, with proper headings (not to mention, narrative structure), I’d gladly read it.
Well then you missed the series of posts (the last few) that begin with:
“Well, I know that I said I would be back in a few months after learning more, but that will not be necessary. I have already learned enough to complete my analysis of Configurations and Amplitudes.
So today I wrote up a brief response based on what I currently understand about Double Slit and Half Silvered Mirror Experiments. Here it is in several posts.
What’s the matter?”
BTW, the post I was talking about was 13 sentences. I don’t know which one you are referring to. Anyways, try to respond to content not style. See if you can exterminate any of my posts, Bugmaster. I welcome it, as I’m here to learn, not defend some sort of belief system.
Once again, I downvoted you because:
Your posts are very hard to read in this cascading thread format. If you formatted them as a top-level Discussion article, they’d be easier to absorb.
Your writing is rambling and disorganized. If you organized your words into blocks of several paragraphs each, with proper headings that follow a logical outline, then your point would be easier to grasp.
Your tone in general is very aggressive. You keep saying stuff like “do this !” and “don’t do that !”, but you’re not the boss of me. There’s nothing wrong with an aggressive tone per se, but it’s much easier to swallow when it’s backed up by some unimpeachable reasoning and evidence—of which you offer very little. Well, perhaps you do offer some, but I didn’t see it, because your posts are so hard to read (as per the previous two bullet points).
Thanx, Bugmaster for splainin your thumbs. It is appreciated. The cascading thread format is not my choice, I much prefer SMF over the blog post style, but that’s what we have to work with. You post and I respond, hence cascading posts.
My writing has been consistent throughout and very organized, which you would know had you taken the time to read them. It took all the posts up until today to get folks to discuss my primary concern (from post one) defining key terms, because it is other members trying to divert the subject matter which is the experiment is flawed because the key terms are not defined or are inconsistent.
The aggressive tone is partially my style but partially stems from others accusing me of being a troll, thumbing me without explanation and refusing to stay on topic. No one has offered a single challenge to my content.
I do not know what you are referring to when you say that I am telling you to do this or not do that, but would like to point out that I was told by one member that I just don’t get it, and that I needed to read such and such if I was going to get any further discussion. I have complied with these demands and have read through dozens of EY’s posts. In fact, you’ll notice that I used quite a bit of his own words to illustrate some of the things that am trying to get across.
In stead of dealing with the issues that I have brought up, I get posts like the ones you are making dealing with style not content. It is your choice to read or not read what I am saying. I am not tied emotionally into the outcome at all, I came to learn about the half-silver mirror experiment and how it is related to SR, GR and QM. I originally thot this was a physics forum because of the topic. Now here you are telling me “You’re not the boss of me” and at the same time telling me how to compose my posts, so that you will read them. How about some counterarguments instead?
OK, I answered every single post addressed to me. I have done this since the beginning nearly one month ago. I have been honest, open and direct. I have tried to understand the community and I have done my best to respond with as much detail as needed to answer the issues raised.
No one has responded in kind. Therefore, Monday I will be back. If anyone needs clarification on anything that I have said, I will respond. Be prepared to answer my questions and address the issues I have raised by relating it directly to the OP (configurations & amplitudes). Otherwise I am done with this thread.
NOTE: the primary issue is defining the key terms related to the OP and dealing with the propagation of light as a particle/wave.
If you have a problem with mainstream physics, please take it up with physicists.
This is a site about the art and science of human rationality. This post was just a part of the Quantum Physics sequence, which was arguably tangential to the overall aims of the site. The author is not a physicist, and is merely reasoning using established math and physics.
I’m sure there are places on the Internet devoted to the discussion of physics. I believe your comments would be much more productive there.
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You’re making a ton of interesting points, but please succinctify (a lot!). I mean, let people reply and stuff. I feel sorry for you writing all that knowing almost no one will see it. It’s obvious you’re reading LW classic posts and making discoveries, and then immediately turning around and applying them, which is great. I just think you’d do well to steep yourself in the posting norms of this forum so you can participate in a more fruitful way. Again, I for one would like to hear well-reasoned radical views.
The style of this comment is preferable to previous ones, but it is still too long and off-topic.
This looks like it might make a good blog post—though I would recommend your own blog rather than a discussion post here. A Tumblr is easy enough to set up, and then you could write a comment like “Detailed arguments [here] (link)”.
Thanx for your comment!
Although it is long, as it broadly covers many blogs in a sequence on how to change your mind, I disagree about it being off topic.
However, let me remind you that it is others that have kept it “off topic” not I. Others requested that I read other blogs in order that I might see more clearly where the author was coming from and the main thrust of Less Wrong.
Yet, it is not entirely off topic, it is just that we are dealing with a very broad subject, Quantum Mechanics, and attempting to approach it from a rationalist pov. The specific topic is Amplitudes and Configurations. The foundational principles of the experiment are flawed. I have attempted to point this out. We can return to the actual experiment once we have agreed on the basic assumptions.
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I am not a physicist, but my understanding is that “travels along a sinusoidal path” is not the same thing as “is a wave”.
Exactly! Wave is a verb, a dynamic concept implying motion and concepts can not move. ADDED: Adding ‘A’ in front of wave makes it appear it is a noun.
One does not need to be a physicist to understand that light is not ‘a’ wave.
There is a difference between an object and a concept. I keep saying this over and over, not because I think anyone is stupid. Because it can take months to understand (unlearn bad habbits). This is the MAIN prob with science in general and math and physics in particular.
BTW: dlthomas, I plussed you for helping me FINALLY get to the Thingy. Defining KEY TERMS!
Geesh! You are all thumbs! (bugman)
So what is this WAVE?
“In physics, a wave is a disturbance or oscillation that travels through spacetime, accompanied by a transfer of energy. Wave motion transfers energy from one point to another, often with no permanent displacement of the particles of the medium—that is, with little or no associated mass transport. They consist, instead, of oscillations or vibrations around almost fixed locations. Waves are described by a wave equation which sets out how the disturbance proceeds over time. The mathematical form of this equation varies depending on the type of wave.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave
According to Wolfram: “noun- (physics) a movement up and down or back and forth” http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=wave
A disturbance that travels? A movement up and down? Neither of these is a noun. Motion is not an object it is a phenomena, a disturbance through a medium. (This is one reason why space is now supposedly not just a vacumn but some”thing” a medium which can be warped, or rippled).
C = f (frequency) x lambda (wavelength)
The physicist has defined frequency in regards to time and wavelength in regards to length. The math keeps frequency constant and light moving at different speeds through different mediums like glass, air, space, etc (refraction). So light accelerates from 200,000 to 300,00 kilometers per second when it passes from water to air. What causes this? No one has an answer! Newton’s third Law requires a force and Einstein (relativity) requires a curvature of space to deflect light. The solution offered is waves. Different mediums cause different resistance to the waves. So do these waves convert to particles when they reach a different medium?
Standing wave: Particles move up and down while wave moves through? Right! Imagine a rope tied to a tree on one end and you on the other. Move the rope up and down and watch the rope move in place as a motion “travels” along the length. Wait! the photon is supposed to be a traveling wave where the billiard balls move up and down as well as forward. What makes the billiard balls move up and down? Especially if they have no mass.
Wave motion transfers energy? Another important word! Energy is the ability to do work, that is, 1 J = 1 W s = 1 kg m^2/s^2. A motion transfers the ability to do work! A motion moves a motion. Right! Another misuse of the English language. Another example of not knowing the difference between objects and concepts, nouns and verbs!
Do you also object to saying that a surfer is riding “a wave”? Motion is not an object, but a particular pattern of motion can be: a wave, an eddy, a tornado...
Thanx for your question!
No, not if we are talking like a couple of buds on the beach observing a surfer over a couple of beers (and he can shoot the curl all he wants). However when we are talking scientific hypothesis or theory, we have to be using unambiguous, non-contradictory, precisely defined terms that can be used consistently throughout a discussion. If Amplitudes and Configurations wants to use key terms, they need to be defined in this way. I provided definitions from wiki and Wolfram. If one reads through the scientific literature (and I previously listed all the major scientists in chronological order) ones sees that the term wave is used inconsistently. This is why each theorist must define his own key terms (the ones his hypothesis or theory depend upon).
Wave/particle paradox is irrational because it is contradictory and illogical. That alone should raise flags and eyebrows!
Oh and BTW the ocean wave you are referring to are water molecules moving up and down!
The theme in my posts all along has been about defining key terms and proper scientific method. We can’t have one without the other. Here is another perfect example of what I have been talking about, when I say proper scientific method.
In the Strange Case of Solar Flares and Radioactive Elements, when the scientists can’t understand how their observations don’t align with their theories, instead of taking a closer look at the assumptions of the theories, they naturally want to invent another particle! (In general, I am pointing to the problem with the Scientific Method. In particular, I am relating this to the back and forth of wave to particle to wave to particle and finally landing on particle/wave duality).
Because of seasonal variations, researchers think that solar flares may be interfering with the rate of decay of radioactive isotopes on earth (which are supposed to be constant).
“It doesn’t make sense according to conventional ideas,” Fischbach said. Jenkins whimsically added, “What we’re suggesting is that something that doesn’t really interact with anything is changing something that can’t be hanged.”
If the mystery particle is not a neutrino, “It would have to be something we don’t know about, an unknown particle that is also emitted by the sun and has this effect, and that would be even more remarkable,” Sturrock said. http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/august/sun-082310.html
Remind you of anything? 0D photons and waves that travel don’t make sense based upon the math and observations, so therefore let’s invent the particle/wave paradox. Now, instead of questioning the assumptions of QM, researchers are assuming a new particle in order to make sense of something which does not make sense. QM says that nothing can affect the rate of decay of isotopes.
Uhuh, thanx for the thumb down, mystery person. Don’t worry about it… the physicists don’t have counterarguments either!
Wave/particle duality is irrational because the language is grammatically incorrect and contradictory (as I have explained repeatedly).
The half silvered mirror experiment, and the double slit experiment are unscientific. The theory they are based upon uses abstract dynamic mathematical language to describe imaginary static objects confusing objects with concepts, instead of illustrating the objects in the hypothesis and explaining the phenomena in the theory as required by the scientific method.
The actual phenomena is simple diffraction caused by destructive wave interference and was properly understood hundreds of years ago.
The particle wave paradox is illogical, because it violates the three Laws of Logic.
Finally, the Lunar Laser Ranging stations in Texas and in New Mexico clearly show the impossibility of light leaving as a photon, traveling as a wave, and arriving as a photon. Therefore, I have shown without any counterargument that Amplitudes and Configurations is nothing but smoke and mirrors.
I think you are fighting a strawman here. By using the word “wave” physicists are not suggesting that something moves along a sinusoidal path. That was your intepretation, an incorrect one, and you have successfully disproved it, which is great. Just please don’t assume that physicists are doing the same mistake.
When you look at the waves on the water, yes, there is a kind of sinusoidal shape. But the word “wave” in physics means that at some places the density of something is higher, and at other places, the density is lower, and the map of the densities looks and moves… well, like the waves on the water.
The waves on the water make a sinusoidal shape, because there is an air above the water, so the higher density of water creates a “wave” in a layman’s meaning of the word. But imagine an explosion deep below the ocean surface, and how the density of the surrounding water changes in time. This is also called “waves” in physics, but there is nothing moving along the sinusoidal path. Similarly, sound makes “waves” (areas of different density) in the air. And a photon also makes some kind of a “wave” (some its properties measured in space and time show the same kind of pattern).
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Instead of talking about details, I’d like to remind you of the big picture.
You think physicists get it wrong and you get it right. That is not completely impossible. However, based on the theories of physicists we have a lot of stuff that works: planes that fly, microwaves that heat, GPS devices that measure your position. So if their theories are wrong, how do you explain that all this stuff, built on their theories, works? Their theories, if not completely correct, must be at least approximately correct, or mathematically equivalent to correct, right? So even if they make errors, they surely do not make obvious errors. However, what you write, suggests that there is a big difference. How is it possible, if you are right, that a theory so different from yours can still produce all the stuff that works?
(To compare, LW contains a few discussions on many-worlds hypothesis versus collapse hypothesis, but those two are mathematically equivalent. In other case, an experiment could be done that decides between them, and someone would probably have done it decades ago.)
In short, the hypothesis User:Monkeymind advanced (somewhere in that rambling mess) was that engineers do not base their technological work on math, but instead on trial-and-error. This is obviously an empirical question. Monkeymind offered as evidence that he himself has a bad grasp of mathematics and yet has built various devices using trial-and-error.
It’s a potentially interesting idea. Do we have any real evidence that mathematics is a necessary component of the development of these devices? Anecdotally Norbert Wiener used mathematics to shoot down Japanese planes using radar.
Not that we have a really good alternative. Physical theories have been preferred for being more mathematically elegant ever since Newton, and before that we didn’t really have physical theories. I think that Monkeymind’s insistence that science is not for making predictions might be a hint that we’re just talking about different things here.
We’ve been over this already.
Doesn’t look like a definitive answer to me, though it does answer somewhat for that particular example.
Agreed, it’s not definitive. The best way to answer this would probably be to round up a bunch of engineers and ask them how much they use math. That would give us a quick average estimate of how today’s engineers use math. Unless you’re interested in specific important discoveries in engineering, in which case it would make more sense to examine the most influential breakthroughs case-by-case.
I personally am a programmer, but the software I write (as well as other software, written by smarter people) is used by genetic engineers. They engineer plants for specific desired traits (stronger drought resistance, bigger fruit, whatever). To do this, they use a ton of conventional math (statistics, specifically), as well as numerical optimization methods (such as neural networks) in order to determine (simplistically speaking) which nucleotides on the genome have an effect on which trait.
A single chromosome of corn consists of about 200,000,000 nucleotides. Good luck with that trial and error !
Yes, and a grain of rice has more genetic material than a human (almost double). So what?
With the simple understanding of emergent complexity, and without any automata or math at all, I can tell you (predict) what any plant or animal will look like on a mountain above 14k feet, or in a tundra. It is because there are only a few configurations for plants or animals in those conditions. We know this because we have observed it over and over again. So I can predict various life forms quite easily.
Although an electron microscope and a great deal of programming was needed at various stages, Craig Venter’s Synthetic Genomics has synthesized an e-coli bacteria. Using four chemicals they created a synthetic bacterial chromosome and used yeast to assemble the gene sequences. They were copying nature, not actually creating anything from scratch. Lots and lots of trial and error was involved. Watch his press conference and let him tell you himself. Professor Cronin of Glascow University has created self replicating, evolving inorganic (metal-based) iCHELLS almost entirely by trial and error mixing.
I’m very excited about their accomplishments and have corresponded with both of them to let them know. I’m not knocking science or those respectable persons involved in the scientific process, I merely want to help make it better.
I am not for getting rid of theory and replacing it with trial and error. Try to actually read what I have written in toto instead of taking a few phrases out of context.
A hypothesis that collapses into category-erroneous incoherence as soon as you realize that math can also be done via trial-and-error.
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With minus 373 Karma points for the last 30 days under your belt, I think you should take a hint and stop posting. If this comment is upvoted/not convincingly disputed (by others), I’m going to start removing some of the worse comments you make in the near future.
Please crack down earlier, harder, and more often. Nobody is going to die from it. Higher average comment quality will attract better commenters in a virtuous circle. There’s no excuse for tolerating the endless nonsense that some commenters post, and those enabling them by responding to them should stop.
This seems to be the main problem, but my recent attempts to discourage those who make high-quality contributions to hopeless or malignant conversations didn’t stir much enthusiasm, so it’d probably take a lot of effort to change this.
(A specific suggestion I have is to establish a community norm of downvoting those participating in hopeless conversations, even if their contributions are high-quality.)
This is something new for LW, in fact this appears to be the first time when a non-Eliezer moderator stepped forward to implement this measure (in this case prompted by Eliezer’s recent statement that deleting posts by a chronically downvoted user who doesn’t stop is to be considered a general policy).
FWIW, you brought me around on this point.
This is the first time I’ve come across the suggestion to downvote well-thought-out contributions to silly conversations, actually, and I like it. I’ll keep that in mind.
How do you define “hopeless”, exactly ? Sometimes, a high-quality post in response to a troll’s or idiot’s thread can be quite helpful to other readers (and lurkers), who aren’t trolls or idiots, but who are just misinformed or new to the topic. I personally have been such a lurker on several sites, but I do acknowledge that my personal experience is not statistically significant.
I generally regard it as a norm that one should not respond to trolls and the like.
But I ignore that norm when I see the opportunity to help someone.
I’m generally against ban-level measures, as such measures are very damaging and the comments don’t seem particularly so.
Why?
Just a few reasons: Removing comments happens silently and without a trace. Such tools can be used by the establishment to quiet dissent. They can break existing conversations. We need more contrarians, not fewer. By removing examples of what not to do, we can no longer point at them as examples. Even if the comments were on the whole annoying, there might be interesting stuff in there worth responding to. Bans, more than downvotes, outright discourage participation amongst those who are in particular need of our help. Freedom of speech is valuable in itself, and its presence here is aesthetically pleasing.
The current procedure: (1) banning mode is only triggered by a user systematically accumulating some crazy amount of negative Karma quickly, (2) you get an explicit statement of banning-mode having been triggered, where others can appeal/discuss the decision, (3) you are free to continue participating if you somehow manage to produce the kind of comments that don’t get downvoted (so it’s more of a parole). In no other cases do the comments get banned.
Yes, and it’s carried out by Vladimir_Nesov and his ilk, which makes me not worry at all about the application in this particular case. I still needed to register my general objection, and I fear for our children’s children who might suffer under an oppressive fascist regime based on the Less Wrong moderation policy.
Oh, there’s no need to fear that: LWers don’t have children.
Upvoted for sheer hubris alone.
If this is where we are at, then please advise me of it so I can take appropriate steps to avoid getting banned. I don’t think I got an explicit statement of banning mode having been triggered, but I want to be sure since there is talk of the ban hammer going down.
I am not trying to be contrary, I just am, so it comes out that way. I truly think that what I have to offer has merit. Of course, if the community does not think so then it is within their power to down vote me into non-existence. That is fair, as I have no right to force my ideas on another person. It just seemed that this would be a place to share ideas. Perhaps not.
The “statement of triggering the banning mode” is this. The steps to avoid triggering it (in your case, to get out of it) are here. This is the conversation where the procedure is getting established.
So let’s have a policy that banned commenters get to post a link to their anti-LW blog. We could list all the anti-LW blogs on a wiki page or something.
I don’t think anyone is proposing to delete past comments.
If I promise to be a high-quality contrarian, can we ban the next five low-quality contrarians?
This is a good thing. LW’s positive impact is likely to lie mostly in building an effective movement, figuring out what issues are important, and pushing on those issues; all of these are helped by a high average level of rationality. LW’s positive impact is unlikely to lie in trying to fix whatever hopeless cases wander by.
I disagree on both counts, and I suspect your other arguments may be rationalizations springing from this value judgement.
I’m generally in favor of more contrarians on LW, but a commenter who rejects empiricism across the board and cannot make any comments trying to understand the arguments in favor of empiricism adds no value here—especially if rejecting empiricism is all he is willing to talk about AND his comments dominate the sidebar for days.
In short, banning is a reasonable measure in this case. That said, I agree with your general points below.
You are probably right about this particular case, but I’d hesitate to generalize it to all possible cases. I personally would find it quite interesting to engage in conversation (or debate) with a staunch anti-empiricist, assuming such a thing was even possible. I have talked to a few anti-empiricists before, and I find their position fascinating… listening to them feels like getting a glimpse of an utterly alien mind.
If you’ll start a discussion topic or a thread somewhere on the issue, I’ll argue against empiricism. We should trade understandings of what we take empiricism to be first though. Let me know if you’re game.
I’m totally game, but I am unskilled in the ways of LW. How do I “start a discussion topic” ? I thought that discussion topics had to be full-fledged articles, according to LW etiquette. I could probably sum up my position in a few bullet points, but I don’t think I have a full article’s worth of material.
But I could be overthinking the whole deal, let me know if that’s the case.
Alternatively, y’all could just have this conversation offline, via email or PM. If it turns out to be valuable, you could turn the conversation into an article.
I guess you could start an article in the discussion section? I don’t know the etiquette very well here either.
The empiricist claim that I would attack is one which says something like this: we have two ways of coming to know something. First, we come to know things by making inferences from other things we already know, and second we come to know things by direct experience of them. The second way, direct experience, is of something like sense-data. At root, everything else we come to know, we come to know by way of sense-data, and our access to sense-data is independent of whatever we infer from it.
That’s the view that I’d attack. I think any theory of empiricism weaker than that isn’t really distinctively empiricist, or distinguishable from, say, many versions of coherentism. But I’d be willing to debate that too.
That sounds like a good starting point to me. We could discuss this via PM, as TheOtherDave suggested; this way, if our discussion turns out to be nothing but noise, we would at least spare the other LWers the aggravation. Alternatively, I could create a discussion post containing the above paragraph, and my response, and we could go from there.
Both of these approaches sound good to me, so let me know what you want to do and I’ll get crackin’… by which I mean, I will write up a response when I have time :-/
On the contrary, the karma system exists in order to make such “cracking down” unnecessary. If comments are downvoted sufficiently, they are hidden. This system is supposed to replace moderator action. If moderators are going to control content then we may as well not have voting.
I’m speaking up in this instance in particular because it seems to me that the only problem with the commenter in question is an intellectual one. The person isn’t behaving badly in any sense other than arguing for an incorrect view and not noticing the higher level of their opponents (which after all can hardly be expected). It’s exactly the kind of thing that downvotes alone are supposed to handle. We’re not talking about a troll or spammer.
The reason it’s important to make this distinction is that censoring for purely viewpoint-based reasons is a Rubicon that we need not cross.
(EDIT: I’ll also point out, for clarity, that I myself have not responded to any of Monkeymind’s comments. Being opposed to banning a commenter is not to be confused with being in favor of engaging them.)
There is a point at which not getting the message from karma is sufficiently damaging to the community that moderator action is called for.
Karma does not merely send messages to the user, but actually does the work of moderation by causing comments to be hidden.
On the sidebar too? That’s the most aggravating issue, to me.
If that’s the problem, shouldn’t the solution be to implement comment-hiding on the sidebar?
Comments in the sidebar tend to be too new to have been voted below −3 or whatever the threshold is.
One could make the sidebar-threshold lower than the ordinary threshold....
True, but it would discriminate less well. It would hide many OK comments that happened to be downvoted once or twice.
Note that for this solution to be an argument against the banning solution, it would need to actually be implemented. Are you predicting that will happen?
I’m saying it ought to be done, if the problem is as described. Or, in other words, that I prefer such a solution over the alternative being proposed (moderator intervention to remove comments).
So you’re not saying that you prefer no banning to banning (given whatever you predict will actually happen to the sidebar)?
I thought I was saying that.
Preferring sidebar change to banning does not imply preferring no banning to banning given actual probability of sidebar change. Do you agree?
Actual probability of sidebar change is, I would hope, dependent on such preferences.
There are some corpses in the street. Some people are proposing to bury them, because they’ll rot and cause diseases. Others are proposing to leave them there, because haha, corpses. In this situation, you may prefer cryopreservation to burial and at the same time prefer burial to non-burial, because cryo probably won’t happen. (Maybe this is an insane alien hypothetical world where cryo is just really unpopular.) If you’re facing a “bury yes or no” button, it may well be rational to push yes. This is true even though the probability of cryopreservation depends on your preferences. Now substitute bad commenters for corpses, banning for burial, and sidebar change for cryo. I’m not saying the parameter values are the same, but do you agree with the qualitative point?
I agree with the qualitative point but think it irrelevant. Not only are we not facing a “yes or no” button, but all that you claim in the above is that it “may well be rational to push yes” (emphasis added) in the event that we are faced with such a button. This says very little.
Again, I reiterate the point made in the grandparent. A hypothetical about a yes-or-no button is no answer to someone specifically advocating a third alternative. If you don’t think the third alternative is possible, argue against it directly; don’t pretend it was never proposed.
I guess I’m hereby tapping out of the discussion.
Fair enough.
It is nonetheless some number smaller than 1.
The question isn’t whether it “exists in order to” make cracking down unnecessary, or whether it “is supposed to” replace moderator action. The question is whether it actually does those things. And it’s far from perfect at doing them. Yes, heavily downvoted comments take up a little less space in the recent comments and in the thread (at least if you have the willpower not to click on them! virtue of curiosity!) But they still take up some space; they take time to be downvoted enough to be hidden; I’m pretty sure they still appear in the sidebar; and the responses to them tend to appear in full, even though these too tend to be valueless. On a more abstract level, I’m worried that such comments influence a collective sense of what the current topic of the site is.
There are intellectual problems other than arguing for the wrong views, and ways of being ban-worthy other than being a troll or spammer. I haven’t read most of the exchanges, but it was certainly my impression that Monkeymind has been communicating in ways that downvotes had made very clear weren’t working for the audience, that he’s been reasoning badly, and that he’s been responding with hostility to downvotes. Are you sure that nobody has been banned for such behavior previously, and that a genuine Rubicon is being crossed here?
If the current system is so perfect that the comments being banned weren’t attracting any attention anyway, is it really a big additional problem for them to be censored?
This. We should have been done with this several days ago.
At the risk of exposing myself to a severe dose of negative karma, I have to say I don’t agree with that approach. This is supposed to be a blog devoted to the art of refining human rationality. If we crack down on people too heavily and too early on, before explaining why we disagree with them, I think it defeats the entire purpose of the blog. What would the point be if we just ostracized people who are not already on board with the Less Wrong view of rationality before explaining why we believe that our own approach is the best approach?
He’s making some interesting points, and he gets extra credit in my view for taking so radical a view while usually remaining reasonable. I find his railing against prediction to be puzzling, but his semantic points and discussion of Ptolemaic explanations have given me a lot to think about.
I also noticed that even some of his friendly, reasoned posts were being downvoted to the same extreme negative levels, which seems unwarranted. He has posted too much without familiarizing himself with the norms here, but he shows sincerity and willingness to learn and adapt. He got a little testy a few times, but he also apologized a lot.
All in all, with a few notable exceptions, it looks like he is getting downvoted mainly for unfamiliarity with LW posting style and for disagreeing with “settled science” (I myself am not too partial to that term). Perhaps also for some unconventional spellings and other idiosyncrasies.
I’m open to being corrected on this, but I think I have read this entire thread and I am pretty sure Monkeymind is not deliberately trolling. High inferential distance feels like trolling so often that it’s almost a forum trope. I myself am enjoying some of his posts and the responses.
I’ll change my mind if he continues with the present posting style, though.
Good intentions don’t always save the day.
Just tell me what you want, and I’ll comply.
If you prefer not having disagreement, I’ll just have to read and not participate. I can’t simply agree because others think differently. Surely that is not what this is about.
Actually, you might be able to.
But that’s mostly a technicality; the correct interpretation/application of the theorem is of some controversy, you’re not obliged to expect us to be rational truthseeking agents, and I don’t think you can rationally expect us to expect you to be a rational truthseeking agent in any event.
If you interpret his comments in light of his disbelief in prediction, empiricism, and the practical mathematics, then his posts have no value.
BTW, I will go by whatever the house rules are. I am not here to be argumentative or disagreeable. I am here to learn. I do not argue for the sake of argument. I argue to become Less Wrong!
Originally I thot this was a physics forum. I came to this thread and got into the discussion w/o reading through the website. My bad! I have tapped out of the thread and will leave it alone. If you must censor me can you please delete all my posts, to be fair. It is hard enough to get people not to take things out of context as it is.
If you were looking for a physics forum, this is probably more along the lines of what you were looking for.
Are you asking me not to post anywhere in the community or just this thread?
I’m asking you to not make comments that get downvoted (yes, it’s a confusing hard-to-comply-with rule). Since this currently seems to be most of them, a good heuristic is to almost completely stop commenting and switch to the lurker-mode for at least a few months.
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“To compare, LW contains a few discussions on many-worlds hypothesis versus collapse hypothesis, but those two are mathematically equivalent. In other case, an experiment could be done that decides between them, and someone would probably have done it decades ago.”
Math can, and in the case of QM, must use infinities and 0-dimensional particles which can not exist in reality.
One can describe Hilbert’s Hotel with infinite rooms, but construction of one is impossible. One can mathematically divide in half infinitely, but can not walk halfway to a wall forever. Math can do many things that reality can not.
I’m a little confused by this objection to say the least. Could you express your views on the following topics in mathematics, particularly when they are used for real world applications, whether it be physics, computer science or engineering?
The use of the “null vector” in linear algebra
Limits approaching 0 in calculus
Generalizing the rules of 3 dimensional space to represent 4 dimensional space
Complex numbers and their various applications, particularly if you think we shouldn’t use the square root of negative one if it has no identifiable physical properties
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If we take that as an axiom, then we’re sure to be right.
Thanx! Added “at the hypothesis stage” for clarity.
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Made my morning. Overall, I know what your posts most remind me of.
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