bigjeff5

Karma: 756

bigjeff5 Mar 22, 2012, 6:37 PM
3 points
in reply to: foucist’s comment on: The Futility of Emergence
Yes, the point is to be sure you aren’t using “Emergence” or “Emergent Phenomena” as stop signs. That you recognize that there is in fact a cause (or causes) for what you are seeing, and if the total seems to be more than the sum of its parts, that there is some mechanism that exists that is amplifying the effects.

Emergence is not an explanation by itself.

bigjeff5 Feb 22, 2012, 12:07 AM
0 points
in reply to: skepsci’s comment on: Hearsay, Double Hearsay, and Bayesian Updates
The appellate system itself—of which cases involving new DNA evidence are a tiny fraction—is a much more useful measure.

There are a whole lot more exonerations via the appeals process than those driven by DNA evidence alone. This aught to be obvious, and the 0.2% provided by DNA is an extreme lower bound, not the actual rate of error correction.

Case in point, I found an article describing a study on overturning death penalty convictions, and they found that 7% of convictions were overturned on re-trial, and 75% of sentences were reduced from the death penalty upon re-trial.

One in fourteen sounds a lot more reasonable to me, and again that’s just death penalty cases, for which you’d expect a higher than normal standard for conviction and sentencing.

The standard estimate is about 10% for the system as a whole.

bigjeff5 Jan 5, 2012, 11:36 PM
8 points
0
in reply to: Shakespeare's_Fool’s comment on: No Evolutions for Corporations or Nanodevices
The theory that you are familiar with is a little off. What stars can produce is solely a function of size, not generation. Already fused material from a previous star does not allow the new star to fuse more elements. Likewise, the longevity of stars is solely a function of size. It’s a balance between the heat of fusion and the pressure of gravity. More matter in the star means more pressure, which means the rate of fusion increases and more elements can be fused, but the fuel is consumed significantly faster.

The smaller a star is the longer it burns, because there is less pressure being exerted by gravity to drive the fusion process. Big stars don’t last long (the biggest only a few million years), but they produce the all of the naturally occurring elements—up to iron via normal fusion, and the heavier elements during supernova that occurs after iron fusion begins. Smaller stars like our sun will never get past the carbon stage and will never go supernova, and smaller stars still like brown dwarfs will never get past the hydrogen stage. These small stars last the longest because their rate of fusion is incredibly slow.

bigjeff5 Jan 5, 2012, 1:11 AM
2 points
in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: Dissolving the Question
Interesting! I hadn’t thought about quantum tunneling as a source of uncertainty (mainly because I don’t understand it very well—my understanding of QM is very tenuous).

bigjeff5 Jan 4, 2012, 10:44 PM
1 point
in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: Dissolving the Question
I’m not sure I understand how quantum events could have an appreciable effect on chemical reactions once decoherance has occurred. Could you point me somewhere with more information? It’s very possible I misunderstood a sequence, especially the QM sequence.

I could also see giving different estimates for the population of Australia for slightly different versions of your brain, but I would think you would give different estimates given the same neuron configuration and starting conditions extremely rarely (that is, run the test a thousand times on molecule for molecule identical brains and you might answer it differently once, and I feel like that is being extremely generous).

Honestly I would think the decoherance would be so huge by the time you got up to the size of individual cells that it would be very difficult to get any meaningful uncertainty. That is to say, quantum events might be generating a constant stream of alternate universe brains, but for every brain that is functionally different from yours there would be trillions and trillions of brains that are functionally identical.

If you include electrons a single water molecule has 64 quarks, and many of the proteins and lipids our cells are made of have thousands of atoms per molecule and therefore tens of thousands of quarks. I am having a hard time envisioning anything less than hundreds of quarks in a molecule doing enough to change the way that molecule would have hooked into its target receptor, and further that another of the same molecule wouldn’t have simply hooked into the receptor in its place and performed the identical function. There may be some slight differences in the way individual molecules work, but you would need hundreds to thousands of molecules doing something different to cause a single neuron to fire differently (and consequently millions of quarks), and I’m not sure a single neuron firing differently is necessarily enough for your estimate of Australia to change (though it would have a noticeable effect given enough time, a la the butterfly effect). The amount of decoherance here is just staggering.

To summarize what I’m saying, you’d need at least hundreds of quarks per molecule zigging instead of zagging in order for it to behave differently enough to have any meaningful effect and probably at least a few hundred molecules per neuron to alter when/how/if that neuron fires, or whether or not the next neuron’s dendrite receives the chemical signal. I would think such a scenario would be extremely rare, even with the 100 billion or so neurons and 100 trillion or so synapses in the brain.

bigjeff5 Jan 4, 2012, 7:02 PM
0 points
in reply to: Endovior’s comment on: Dissolving the Question
Do neurons operate at the quantum level? I thought they were large enough to have full decoherance throughout the brain, and thus no quantum uncertainty, meaning we could predict this particular version of your brain perfectly if we could account for the state and linkages of every neuron.

Or do neurons leverage quantum coherence in their operation?

bigjeff5 Jan 3, 2012, 1:45 AM
21 points
0
in reply to: arundelo’s comment on: Two More Things to Unlearn from School
Yeesh, that’s terrible. It kind of figures that he’d rather mislead a class full of students about the way physics works than own up to his mistake.

It reminds me of an error I had been taught about the way airfoils work that wasn’t corrected until I read a flippin comic strip on the subject almost a decade after I graduated high school.

I was stunned, and spent the rest of the afternoon learning how airfoils really work. What makes this particular example so tragic is it leverages another principle of physics that you won’t realize doesn’t fit if you are taught to accept everything the teacher says as gospel. What’s worse is I’m pretty sure the mistake is still there in the vast majority of textbooks.
What links here?
- arundelo's comment on Why some people seem to be proud of their ignorance? by uzalud (Jan 3, 2012, 7:33 AM; 2 points)

bigjeff5 Jan 2, 2012, 7:13 PM
2 points
in reply to: SeanReilly’s comment on: Two More Things to Unlearn from School
Ad hominem literally means “to the man” or “to the person”.

It was most certainly an ad hominem question, but given the framing he probably wasn’t intending to discredit the argument with the ad hominem and therefore didn’t commit the ad hominem fallacy.

The fallacy is making an ad hominem attack in order to distract from or discredit the argument without addressing the merits of the argument itself. The traits can certainly be related to the argument, and in fact the more closely related the traits are the more effective the fallacy is at convincing others (e.g. He’s wrong about QFT because he isn’t a physicist vs he’s wrong about QFT because he drinks milk—both fallacies, the first much more effective than the second). That doesn’t mean the ad hominem isn’t relevant nor worth discussing, it only means the ad hominem is not evidence against the argument. The fallacy lies in thinking that it is.

SORRY, idiots! (that’s not a.h. either)

It’s still ad hominem, it’s just not a logical fallacy (but given that the word “idiot” means a person with extra-ordinarily low intelligence, it’s almost certainly incorrect).

bigjeff5 Jan 2, 2012, 6:11 PM
19 points
0
in reply to: gjayb’s comment on: Two More Things to Unlearn from School

I will say that I also had a high school English teacher who would use the wrong word or give a ridiculous interpretation in the hopes that a student would correct him and learn to not always trust authority.

I had a teacher somewhat similar to that my freshman year in high school, except she was a last-minute replacement and was not really an English teacher. Her grammar was atrocious, and I ended up getting detention for correcting her too often (interrupting class or lack of respect or some such was the reason given on the detention). It was probably my first real experience with an authority figure being so utterly and obviously wrong, and I wasn’t sorry at all for the detention. It was well worth it.

bigjeff5 Jan 2, 2012, 1:26 AM
0 points
in reply to: komponisto’s comment on: Absolute Authority
Just noticed this comment when I was looking through my messages for an old comment, and I wanted to respond.

It is the word “too” that is important there, and the usage you describe is only used as an affirmative for contradicting a negative statement (at least, that’s proper grammar anyway).

For example, if the original statement had been “God must not make a boulder he cannot lift!” and I had responded with “God must too make a boulder he cannot lift!” you would be right, but the original statement is an affirmative statement (“God can make a boulder he cannot lift.”), my own sentence before it is an affirmative (in the grammatical sense—not so much in the “uplifting” sense), so trying to contradict either with an affirmative doesn’t make any sense.

Also, I did a Google search, and while using “too” between must and another verb is not common, using “must too” to mean “must also” is by far the most common usage I could find. I do admit that other combinations of verb “too” verb seem to imply contradicting a negation even without the proper context, so that usage is definitely not as clear as I originally thought it would be. I still think it’s pretty, though.

bigjeff5 Jan 1, 2012, 7:05 PM
7 points
0
in reply to: Wiseman’s comment on: Anthropomorphic Optimism
The criticism as I read it isn’t against group selection in general—just looking at Eliezer’s examples should tell you that he believes a type of group selection can and does exist.

The initial idea behind group selection, however, was that genes would be selected for that were detrimental to the individual, yet positive for the group. Wade’s experiment proved this wrong, without eliminating the idea of group selection altogether.

This is what Eliezer is saying is an evolutionary fairy tale. When group selection occurs, it absolutely must occur via a mechanism that gives individual genes an advantage. It cannot occur via allele sacrifice without in some way increasing the survival of the allele, because that allele will decrease in the population, preventing future sacrifice.

It’s the bias that led to the hypothesis that is obviously wrong in hindsight, and that is what Eliezer speaks against, not group selection in general (though I do think he thinks group selection isn’t nearly as influential as group selectionists wish it were). Anthropomorphic optimism is the reason group selectionists first hypothesized the pretty picture of restrained breeding, when the strategy that makes the most sense evolutionarily is cannibalism, and if they had been aware of their bias they may have actually predicted the optimal strategy before performing the experiment, instead of being so completely wrong.

bigjeff5 Jan 1, 2012, 6:17 PM
0 points
in reply to: botogol2’s comment on: Anthropomorphic Optimism
The selection pressure is supposed to be lower adult populations, how many infants doesn’t really matter. Selecting on fewer infants (I assume you mean larva here—if not what’s the difference?) would force the expected result (restricted breeding of some kind) instead of allowing multiple potential paths to achieve the same goal. Falsification must be a possibility.

bigjeff5 Dec 31, 2011, 6:34 PM
0 points
in reply to: dlthomas’s comment on: GAZP vs. GLUT
I didn’t misspeak, even though the argument I gave wasn’t the exact same one that Eliezer gave it is essentially the exact same argument. The “rinse, repeat” was meant to suggest you keep going with it ad infinitum, and the very next step I came up with was the exact same as Eliezer’s. It’s a reference to washing directions on shampoo bottles, and I’ve honestly never had anyone get confused by it, so I apologize.

The point is, if the thing looking up the inputs (to continue where I left off) isn’t conscious, then the thing that created the thing that looks up the inputs is probably conscious. If the thing that created the thing that created the GLUT isn’t conscious (e.g. a true random code generator that happens to produce the GLUT that matches our universe) then the thing that chose that GLUT out of the multitude of others is probably conscious. This is exactly Eliezer’s argument, unless I have completely misunderstood it, and if I have I would love to be corrected (I’ve only been actively engaged in this kind of thinking for a little over a year now, so I’m still very much a newbie). As it is, I don’t see what is different in principal between my point and Eliezer’s.

My point was in regards to Roland’s argument, which was that he didn’t mind the GLUT being consciousness in his Zombie World. I was attempting to point out that if the GLUT is conscious then the anti-zombie principle is automatically validated on the grounds that it’s not a Zombie World in that case.

In order for epiphenomenalists to effectively argue the Zombie World using a GLUT, it cannot be conscious itself. Eliezer argued (in a nutshell) that if there was a conscious mind behind the creation of the GLUT, then the GLUT was simply a tool of the conscious mind, and that the GLUT wasn’t actually running things, the consciousness behind it was. This is true regardless of where in the process the consciousness is, the point is that it is there somewhere and has a meaningful affect on the universe it exists in. Any world that his this kind of connection to a consciousness by definition can’t be a real Zombie World.

If consciousness has no affect on the universe then it is meaningless. This has been my understanding of Eliezer’s position throughout this entire series.

bigjeff5 Dec 31, 2011, 12:53 AM
1 point
in reply to: dlthomas’s comment on: GAZP vs. GLUT
Right, I was arguing Roland’s point, not Eliezer’s, and I don’t see where I disagreed with Eliezer in any way.

Roland just said the GLUT is conscious, which means by definition it isn’t in a Zombie World, because the definition of a Zombie World is one that is apparently identical to ours, minus consciousness.

I’m not sure where I screwed the synthesis up here, Eliezer’s post doesn’t really come into it except for framing the subject of Zombie Worlds, GLUTs, and consciousness.

I was just saying if the GLUT is conscious then the Anti-Zombie position automatically wins the Zombie World GLUT argument, by definition. Perhaps I should have just said it exactly like that?

bigjeff5 Dec 30, 2011, 10:58 PM
2 points
in reply to: Dojan’s comment on: Evolutions Are Stupid (But Work Anyway)

Also: I’m not finding any references to god in this article, except the explicit statements on how this is not about creationism or an evolutionary fairy. What am I missing?

Eliezer’s discussion of evolution as an “alien god”. That is, if you absolutely have to have a “god” figure, then evolution itself fits the bill pretty perfectly. Unfortunately for the Judeo-Christian types, it’s less Jehovah and more Azathoth (H.P. Lovecraft’s god of chaos) in nature. See Alien God.

I think you hit the nail on the head regarding /ehj2.

bigjeff5 Dec 30, 2011, 6:56 PM
2 points
in reply to: k4ntico’s comment on: The Wonder of Evolution
You obviously don’t know much about about the US and its politics, since roughly 50% of the American population agrees with you about the terribleness and destructiveness of war, and seek to eliminate it as quickly as possible. Part of the reason Obama’s ratings are so poor in the US at the moment is because he has not pulled the troops out of Iraq/Afghanistan quickly enough.

It would be worth spending some time in different parts of the US for a while, or even just reading news from multiple news agencies to get a better picture of the opinions of the American people. Pretty much all of the wars the US has ever been involved in have had this duplicitous nature. It’s not so much a double standard as it is multiple personalities.

Also, even after reading your post I have no idea what the US’s position on war has to do with this discussion on evolution. I don’t see why a discussion on evolution should necessarily contain within it any discussion on US military policy. Is there some reason we can’t discuss evolution without discussion modern military activities? If so, I don’t see it, and you didn’t really point it out to me.

Lastly, I don’t see how we can have a discussion that doesn’t involve population genetics, considering it is a critical component of modern evolutionary theory. It’s like saying we shouldn’t talk about space-time when discussing General Relativity. It really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

I’m curious how a process that takes billions of iterations over millions of years to produce anything interesting can reasonably be considered anything but blind and slow. Trying new things at random is kinda the definition of blind in these situations (regardless of how efficient the selection mechansim may be), and taking three and a half billion years to great humans seems pretty slow, subjectively. What alternative process is it quicker and more insightful than? Certainly not a designer that did the job in 6 days (aka Intelligent Design/Creationism).

As for the ethnocentricity, ID is largely a problem in the US, so that shouldn’t be a surprise. Other countries have done a pretty good job of figuring out how well evolution works, and that it is therefore probably correct. We still have 50% of the population here holding us back in that regard (evolution is winning anyway, though—it’s pretty hard to deny it).

bigjeff5 Dec 29, 2011, 1:48 AM
0 points
in reply to: bigjeff5’s comment on: An Alien God
Just noticed Psy-Kosh posted the same video four years ago, back before the comments nested—oops!

bigjeff5 Dec 29, 2011, 1:34 AM
0 points
in reply to: Jacob_Stein’s comment on: An Alien God
If watches reproduced and mutated randomly and were selected for accuracy then they most certainly would build themselves. Microsecond accuracy in just a few weeks, no watchmaker required.

See Evolution IS a Blind Watchmaker.

It took as little as 100 generations to get clocks that are accurate to the second (3 handed clock), and depending on the initial conditions sub-second accuracy (4 handed clock) was possible within a few hundred more generations.

It’s pretty interesting, he got a series of “epochs”, like “the age of the pendulum”, where things didn’t change much. Then all of a sudden a random mutation would turn a series of neutral mutations (mutations that aren’t beneficial or harmful, and are therefore not selected for or against) into a beneficial mutation and a new type of clock would dominate almost immediately. The transition periods are so short compared to the stable periods that it really illustrates why we rarely find crazy transition species in nature—they simply weren’t around long enough compared to the stable species.

bigjeff5 Dec 28, 2011, 1:00 AM
8 points
in reply to: Nathan_Myers’s comment on: Rational vs. Scientific Ev-Psych
Regarding the quasar “in” NGC7319 - read here for a discussion on the stellar object.

Needless to say, the reason it is ignored isn’t because it contradicts mainstream cosmological theory, it’s because it coincides with it pretty much perfectly given the state of our observational technology.

When judging articles like this, a simple, lazy estimate of probabilities is very helpful. For example, which do you think is more likely, 100 years of highly successful physics and cosmology is flat wrong (which is required for the quasar to be inside NGC7319, everything from what quasars are made of to the physics behind how they emit EM radiation must be wrong), or that a handful of researchers jumped to conclusions in their excitement? My vote goes to the latter until some pretty extraordinary evidence is found confirming their claims. Modern telescopes aren’t precise enough to rule their claims out completely, but the quasar doesn’t deviate from known cosmological effects which fit the current theory of the cosmos.

I’d wager a similar story for comets, I didn’t look that up though as they don’t interest me nearly as much as quasars do.

There is also a fairly significant amount of rather difficult to refute evidence for the existence of dark energy and dark matter. Matter that both has mass (and therefore gravity) and also does not interact with ordinary matter certainly exists—the best example is the neutrino. There just isn’t a known mechanism to produce enough of this type of matter to account for the amount observed in the universe. Hence the “dark” in the name (which, incidentally, many physicists don’t approve of precisely because it sounds too much like “magic”).

The existence of dark energy is even more definitive. Simply put, the universe is expanding at an accelerated pace. This is undeniable. The only way for acceleration to occur is for energy to be expended (unless you are willing to throw away thermodynamics’ otherwise perfect record). There are a couple of potential sources for dark energy (like vacuum energy) but nothing close to definitive.

Again, which is more likely? That hundreds of years of science is completely wrong (with nothing even sensible to take its place, I might add) or a hitherto unknown aspect of the universe has been discovered? Honestly, given the amount of evidence supporting the current models used in physics “something new” is by far the simplest and most likely explanation.

Dark matter and dark energy aren’t stop signs to cosmologists and physicists, they are basically shorthand for “we don’t know yet what this stuff is or how it got here, we are still trying to figure that out, but whatever it is should look something like this”.

And if you think scientists have been ignoring these problems, especially dark matter, then you haven’t been paying enough attention to theoretical and experimental physics over the past decade, particularly the past 5 years or so. One of the driving forces behind the LHC (certainly not the only, of course) was dark matter.

bigjeff5 Dec 27, 2011, 1:21 AM
6 points
in reply to: mikedarwin’s comment on: Prediction is hard, especially of medicine
I recently watched a BBC documentary called “Back From The Dead”, mainly about using extreme hypothermia to prevent IRI in some rather extreme cases, though drug development was also mentioned (that portion mostly focused on the study of cell death).

One case was a Norwegian woman who fell in a crevasse while hiking on a glacier—the extreme cold plus 3+ hours of constant CPR was enough to keep her brain alive long enough to be revived. She made a full recovery and now works at the hospital that revived her.

Another was a man who’s blood was intentionally cooled to extreme hypothermic temperatures in order to repair an aortic aneurism. Doctors were able to operate for 45 minutes with the patient in full cardiac arrest with no ill effects.

It’s amazing to me that the basis for these techniques have been around for so long, and yet still they seem like science fiction when anyone discusses them. Since the benefits of mild hypothermia had been at least hinted at 30+ years ago, you would think researchers would have been playing with extreme hypothermia soon after and we’d be a lot further along with this stuff in general.

I don’t have any idea how often hypothermia is actually used to save lives, but the documentary made it seem rare, with extreme hypothermia being only used in one or two hospitals in the world. Your experience seems to back that up as well.