Great big ocean waves in an even bigger blank spot
The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean is a book about very big ocean waves—the science, the danger (mostly to ships), and the surfers.
Really big waves weren’t scientifically verified until about ten years ago—part of the problem was that even though sailors had been reporting huge waves, scientists had a theory that big waves (maybe over 80′, though I don’t have a sharp dividing line) required very rare conditions. Once satellite surveillance for waves was possible, it turned out that big waves were fairly common, and might explain why a ship or two per week disappears.
Russell Wynn: “The way the radar system works, the very big ones are difficult to measure,” he said. When behemoth waves appeared in the satellite data, the space agencies considered these readings to be errors, and they were automatically deleted. “They give you missing value code instead, which is really annoying. We shout at them for that.”
The reason I’m posting this is that I’ve become very skeptical about any theory which claims that something which is well-attested and physically possible is actually not happening.
Do you have some other examples?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_(lightning)
I remember reading about how these were theorized by some sort of atmospheric physics and seen by pilots, but not officially noted since seeing giant jellyfish in the sky isn’t good for your job prospects as a pilot.
Specifically contemporary examples that are not currently “accepted” but look otherwise interesting.
One of the great things about studying mathematical tomography is that you discover just how hacked together many modern imaging techniques are. The feeling is very much that there’s a thin margin in which good imaging is possible, and then everything else is based on unfounded assumptions about the usefulness of e.g., Tikhonov regularization and a few numerical experiments.
Is your initial link correct?
It certainly wasn’t. Thanks for letting me know.
Would Megacryometeors be another example? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megacryometeor
How do you know rogue waves are physically possible if you have never seen any? They don’t follow the equations for wave height that people used to model weight heights. The equations that people did use did predict the wave heights that scientists observed.
Maybe the lesson is: Don’t assume the variable you are studying is normally distributed just because all your observations fit a normal distribution.
Another lesson might be: don’t assume that large numbers of people with similar observations have to be lying or mistaken.
Also don’t assert your observations fit a normal distribution unless you’ve gathered enough data to distinguish a normal distribution from other distributions. It’s remarkably common for scientists to just compute a mean and standard deviation and assume the data is normally distributed.
Well, they had a lot of data about waves in the ocean but still got it wrong.
Did anyone actually analyze the distribution of wave heights?
In classical physics people did develop forumla to model waves. Freakwaves don’t follow those classical formula.
“Physically possible” probably isn’t a necessary condition since we only have theories about what is physically possible. Sufficiently well-attested is probably sufficient.
Ghosts are well-attested. God is well-attested. Being well-attested isn’t that strong evidence. But if there’s no particularly good reason to think that it isn’t happening, then it probably happens.
Alien UFOs are physically possible, while ball lightning was long thought physically impossible, according to my understanding.
There’s been considerable debate in philosophy about what the heck physicalism (the belief that everything is physical) really amounts to, and I (as a physicalist) have tended to think that the real issues may be best described negatively rather than positively; it’s not an endorsement of things which sufficiently fit the paradigm of the physical, but rather rejection of what I usually call the spooky. One of the common characteristics of the phenomena I class as spooky is that belief in them is encouraged by well-documented cognitive biases, one of the biggest being the human tendency to see agency everywhere. Overdeveloped agency-detection is no doubt involved in belief in God, ghosts, and alien-piloted UFOs. Ball lightning, on the other hand, seems to have nothing to do with agency, and not to be particularly spooky. And, returning to the original topic, big ocean waves don’t seem particularly spooky either. So I’m going to suggest that “non-spooky” may be a helpful translation of her “physically possible” (and indeed of many uses of the phrase in general).
And non-spooky really means “doesn’t require the prior-probability-equivalent of a Boltzmann Brain suddenly materializing to cause the action attributed to agency”.
You’re mixing up evidence and priors. God being well-attested is strong evidence, just not nearly strong enough to overcome the vanishingly small prior for such a complex hypothesis.
Given similarly strong evidence for a hypothesis that’s actually plausible, you would probably believe it. If you had never seen a cat before but knew that a large fraction of the population claimed to have one living with them, you probably wouldn’t doubt their existence.
The problem with God is not a low prior. An anthropomorphic god has a very high prior (according to human belief machinery) the thing that sinks it is the extremely strong evidence against it in the form of nearly every aspect of the world looking like it was never touched by anything like intelligent engineering.
nyan_sandwich, you’re really good at delving into the cthonian labyrinths of post-x-rationalist thought, learning something new, and distilling from it an essence potable to merely human minds. It’s to provoke another round of that skill usage that I bring up this tweet:
Any chance of a nyan_sandwich post on the differences between universal priors and optimal codes?
we’ll see. I’d have to develop a thorough understanding and see a need for a post, and decide that writing was a good idea...
I think “physically possible” was supposed to mean the same thing you mean with “actually plausible”.
There’s sufficient evidence that people experience what they call “ghosts” and “god” for me to believe that such experiences exist. I don’t think “ghosts” or “gods” are the cause of those experiences, however.
The same could be said for giant waves.
Well, yeah. The ability of humans to self-delude themselves is well-known, and of course mental illness exists as well.
It seems a little silly to say “I believe these experiences exist”; it almost sounds like you’re trying to imply that some greater force exists. It’s reminiscent of those people that say “well, I don’t believe in God, but there has to be something” as if they’d just uttered a profound statement.
It’d be silly to doubt that at least a small portion of the people reporting experiences believe they experienced whatever they said.
I’m not implying anything greater than the evolutionary forces that gave us our other quirks. The statement “well, I don’t believe in God, but there has to be something” may not be profound, but it’s mostly accurate. The “something” is most likely specific neural structures that cause religious experiences in people under the right conditions.
To further clarify, I think that some religious experiences are really experienced (e.g. they are not just false memories of experiences that didn’t happen) in the human brain and are not conscious self-delusion or self-deception. I think that all religious experiences have natural explanations that don’t require the participation of any agent more complex than a standard human.
Beliefs have to pay rent.
Would you start believing in some greater force if someone demostrates to you that those experiences exist by guiding you through the experience?
How much different kind of spiritual experiences would you need to experience to drop your belief in materialism?
Exactly. When has a belief in god payed rent?
This is very wishy-washy language. If there were enough evidence of a ‘greater force’ to make it worth believing, I would believe it. Naturally, that would have to be a lot of evidence.
For future reference, you’d use “many” instead of “much” in your first sentence. Anyway, by materialism do you mean physicalism? As above, I would need an enormous amount of evidence to change my views in this case.
I spoke didn’t use the God word but spoke more generally about spiritual experiences, which you believe don’t happen.
The question is: How much evidence would you need?
If I understand your map of the world right, spiritual experiences like recalling past lifes shouldn’t exist? The people who make those reports didn’t really made those experiences.
If someone would guide you through recalling a memory of a pastlife that feels as real as the memories that you recall from your present life how much would that cause you to update?
Knowing how easily manipulable the human mind is, I wouldn’t weight that as very strong evidence, especially when it comes to subjective feelings. As an example, humans modify their memories all the time without really realizing it, as in the case of people who point fingers at the wrong crime suspect and decades later are proven wrong.