First of all, your experimental method can really benefit from a control group. Pick a setting where a thing is definitely not randomly sampled from a set. Perform your experiment and see what happens.
This word turned out to be “mosaic”. It has 6 letters. Let’s test whether it’s length is randomly sampled from the number of months in a year.
As 6*2=12, this actually works perfectly, even better than estimating the number of months in a year based on your birth month!
It also works decently to estimate several other things. The number of hours in a day, number of days in a months. Number of minutes in an hour. It gets the order of magnitude right! If we use the number of minutes in your 15:14 timestamp to estimate the number of minutes in an hour we are simularly off.
Worse with number of days in a week and number of days in a year. But it’s mistaken by only one order of magnitude, maybe it’s also okay?
At this point the problems with your methodology should be clear:
You didn’t describe beforehand the criterions for accepting or rejecting a hypothesis.
You didn’t describe beforehand which hypothesis you were planning to test.
You were testing only hypothesis where you expected a positive answer.
Secondly, if we want to talk about DA or SH, there is the whole jump from
“I can approximate my birth date as a random sample from all the days in the month/months in a year”
to
“I can approximate my birth rank as a random sample from all the births of people throughout history/starting from the moment of knowing about DA”.
The latter doesn’t follow from the former, even though in semantic terms both can potentially be described as random sampling of a person throughout time.
The cyclical nature of days in a months and months in a year never allows you to be off more than by an order of magnitude. Even if your parents specifically timed your conception to give you birth on the first of January, therefore putting you in a very specific “reference class”, you won’t be extremely mistaken about these numbers following your methodology.
On the other hand, there is no such gurantee for birth orders of a people which work as natural numbers, not as elements of a finite field.
Don’t agree. You chose word length generator as you know that typical length of words is 1-10. Thus not random.
I didn’t rejected any results – it works in any test I have imagined, and I also didn’t include several experiments which have the same results, e.g the total number of the days in a year based on my birthday (got around 500) and total number of letters in english alphabet (got around 40).
Note that alphabet letter count is not cyclical as well as my distance to equator.
Do not understand this:
Even if your parents specifically timed your conception to give you birth on the first of January, therefore putting you in a very specific “reference class”, you won’t be extremely mistaken about these numbers following your methodology.
If I were born 1 of January, I would get years duration 2 days which is very wrong.
You chose word length generator as you know that typical length of words is 1-10. Thus not random.
This is not relevant to my point. After all you also know that typical month is 1-12
No, the point is that I specifically selected a number via an algorithm that has nothing to do with sampling months. And yet your test outputs positive result anyway. Therefore your test is unreliable.
I didn’t rejected any results – it works in any test I have imagined
That’s exactly the problem. Essentially you are playing a 2,4,6 game, got no negative result yet and are already confident about the rule.
Note that alphabet letter count is not cyclical as well as my distance to equator.
Distance to equator is in fact cyclical in a very literal sense. Alphabet letters do not have anything to do with random sampling of you through time.
If I were born 1 of January, I would get years duration 2 days which is very wrong.
It’s not more wrong for a person whose parents specifically tried to give birth at this date than for a person who just happened to be born at this time without any planning. And even in this extreme situation your mistake is limited by two orders of magnitude. There is no such guarantee in DA.
For example, If I use self-sampling to estimate the number of seconds in the year, I will get a correct answer of around several tens of millions. But using word generator will never output a word longer than 100 letters.
I didn’t understand your idea here:
It’s not more wrong for a person whose parents specifically tried to give birth at this date than for a person who just happened to be born at this time without any planning. And even in this extreme situation your mistake is limited by two orders of magnitude. There is no such guarantee in DA.
hich For example, If I use self-sampling to estimate the number of seconds in the year, I will get a correct answer of around several tens of millions. But using word generator will never output a word longer than 100 letters.
Using the month of your birth to estimate the number of seconds in the year also won’t work well, unless you multiply it by number of seconds in a month.
Likewise here. You can estimate the number of months in a year by number of letters in the world and then multiply it by number of seconds in a months.
I didn’t understand your idea here
Consider this.
Parents of person A tried really hard to give birth to A on the first of January and indeed it happened
Person B just so happened to be born on the first of January
Parents of person C tried really hard to give birth to C on the 15th of June and indeed it happened
Person D just so happened to be born on the 15th of June
Here date of births of B and D can be approximated as randomly sampled, while A and C are not. Your test, however will return that C and D can treat themselves as random sample, making both false positive and false negative errors.
This is because your test simply checks the distance from the mean value which, while somewhat correlated to being a result of random sampling, is a completely different thing.
I meant that if I know only the total number of the seconds which passed from the beginning of the year (around 15 million for today of this year) – and I want to predict the total number of seconds in each year. No information about months.
As most people are born randomly and we know it, we can use my date of birth as random. If we have any suspicions about non randomness, we have to take them into account.
First of all, your experimental method can really benefit from a control group. Pick a setting where a thing is definitely not randomly sampled from a set. Perform your experiment and see what happens.
Consider. I generated a random word using this site https://randomwordgenerator.com/
This word turned out to be “mosaic”. It has 6 letters. Let’s test whether it’s length is randomly sampled from the number of months in a year.
As 6*2=12, this actually works perfectly, even better than estimating the number of months in a year based on your birth month!
It also works decently to estimate several other things. The number of hours in a day, number of days in a months. Number of minutes in an hour. It gets the order of magnitude right! If we use the number of minutes in your 15:14 timestamp to estimate the number of minutes in an hour we are simularly off.
Worse with number of days in a week and number of days in a year. But it’s mistaken by only one order of magnitude, maybe it’s also okay?
At this point the problems with your methodology should be clear:
You didn’t describe beforehand the criterions for accepting or rejecting a hypothesis.
You didn’t describe beforehand which hypothesis you were planning to test.
You were testing only hypothesis where you expected a positive answer.
Secondly, if we want to talk about DA or SH, there is the whole jump from
“I can approximate my birth date as a random sample from all the days in the month/months in a year”
to
“I can approximate my birth rank as a random sample from all the births of people throughout history/starting from the moment of knowing about DA”.
The latter doesn’t follow from the former, even though in semantic terms both can potentially be described as random sampling of a person throughout time.
The cyclical nature of days in a months and months in a year never allows you to be off more than by an order of magnitude. Even if your parents specifically timed your conception to give you birth on the first of January, therefore putting you in a very specific “reference class”, you won’t be extremely mistaken about these numbers following your methodology.
On the other hand, there is no such gurantee for birth orders of a people which work as natural numbers, not as elements of a finite field.
Don’t agree. You chose word length generator as you know that typical length of words is 1-10. Thus not random.
I didn’t rejected any results – it works in any test I have imagined, and I also didn’t include several experiments which have the same results, e.g the total number of the days in a year based on my birthday (got around 500) and total number of letters in english alphabet (got around 40).
Note that alphabet letter count is not cyclical as well as my distance to equator.
Do not understand this:
If I were born 1 of January, I would get years duration 2 days which is very wrong.
This is not relevant to my point. After all you also know that typical month is 1-12
No, the point is that I specifically selected a number via an algorithm that has nothing to do with sampling months. And yet your test outputs positive result anyway. Therefore your test is unreliable.
That’s exactly the problem. Essentially you are playing a 2,4,6 game, got no negative result yet and are already confident about the rule.
Distance to equator is in fact cyclical in a very literal sense. Alphabet letters do not have anything to do with random sampling of you through time.
It’s not more wrong for a person whose parents specifically tried to give birth at this date than for a person who just happened to be born at this time without any planning. And even in this extreme situation your mistake is limited by two orders of magnitude. There is no such guarantee in DA.
For example, If I use self-sampling to estimate the number of seconds in the year, I will get a correct answer of around several tens of millions. But using word generator will never output a word longer than 100 letters.
I didn’t understand your idea here:
Using the month of your birth to estimate the number of seconds in the year also won’t work well, unless you multiply it by number of seconds in a month.
Likewise here. You can estimate the number of months in a year by number of letters in the world and then multiply it by number of seconds in a months.
Consider this.
Parents of person A tried really hard to give birth to A on the first of January and indeed it happened
Person B just so happened to be born on the first of January
Parents of person C tried really hard to give birth to C on the 15th of June and indeed it happened
Person D just so happened to be born on the 15th of June
Here date of births of B and D can be approximated as randomly sampled, while A and C are not. Your test, however will return that C and D can treat themselves as random sample, making both false positive and false negative errors.
This is because your test simply checks the distance from the mean value which, while somewhat correlated to being a result of random sampling, is a completely different thing.
I meant that if I know only the total number of the seconds which passed from the beginning of the year (around 15 million for today of this year) – and I want to predict the total number of seconds in each year. No information about months.
As most people are born randomly and we know it, we can use my date of birth as random. If we have any suspicions about non randomness, we have to take them into account.