What good is math if people don’t know what to connect it to?
Allow me to answer your question with a question: What good is music?
What good is math if people don’t know what to connect it to?
Allow me to answer your question with a question: What good is music?
I think the title of the book was supposed to be ironic: they thought of themselves as the “smartest guys in the room” but their carefully constructed house of cards eventually collapsed.
I know of at least one decision I made that turned out poorly; my choice of college major. I do not know if it was the best decision to have made based on the information I had at the time.
My experience was this:
I was considering which of two majors would be better. I was advised to choose one of them. I chose that one.
In my second year of college, I began taking courses specific to that major. I did not like them. I was informed that those courses are, in fact, awful, everyone hates them, but they cover necessary material for the better, more advanced courses, and that once I started to take the upper level courses, I would like the major more than I currently did. I accepted this advice, and did not change majors.
I then began to take higher level courses. As it turned out, they were about as bad as the lower level courses. It took me a while to realize this. By the time I thought it was likely that I was in the wrong major, however, I had taken many courses that could not be easily transferred to any other field. I decided that, as the courses I had already taken were a sunk cost, it would be better to put up with a few more awful courses and then graduate than to transfer to another major and start my college degree from scratch.
In the end, it took me six years to graduate. I graduated in May 2006, worked during the summer of 2006 in a temporary position I did not like, and have been happily job-free ever since (much to the dismay of my parents).
In hindsight, I realize that I would be more satisfied if I had chosen a different major, but I do not know at what point I ought to have known that I should have chosen a different major.
This is off-topic, but it might amuse some of the people here.
I am the very model of a Singularitarian (YouTube video)
I’ve read that physics journals use a 0.001% standard for statistical significance. Maybe, in the case of “alternative medicine” or “parapsychology” experiments that must rely on unknown physics to work, we should insist on the same standard? ;)
Here’s the thing.
I could a book and find that the arguments in the book are “valid”—that it is impossible, or at least unlikely, that the premises are true and the conclusion false. However, what I can’t do by reading is determine if the premises are true.
In the infamous Alien Autopsy “documentary”, there were three specific claims made for the authenticity of the video.
1) An expert from Kodak examined the film, and verified that it is as old as was claimed. 2) A pathologist was interviewed, who said that the autopsy portrayed was done in the manner that an actual autopsy would have been done. 3) An expert from Spielberg’s movie studio testified that modern special effects could not duplicate the scenes in the video.
If you accept these statements as true, it becomes reasonable to accept that the footage was actually showing what it appeared to show; an autopsy of dead aliens.
Upon seeing these claims, though, my response was along the lines of “I defy the data.” As it turns out, all three of those statements were blatant lies. There was no expert from Kodak who verified the film. Kodak offered to verify the film, but was denied access. Many other pathologists said that the way the autopsy was performed in the film was absurd, and that no competent pathologist would ever do an autopsy on an unknown organism in that manner because it would be completely useless. The person from Spielberg’s movie studio was selectively quoted and was very angry about it. What he really said that the film was good for whatever grade B studio happened to have produced it.
I could read your book, but I believe that it is more likely that the statements in the book are wrong than it is that psi exists. As Thomas Jefferson did not say, “It is easier to believe that two Yankee professors [Profs. Silliman and Kingsley of Yale] would lie than that stones would fall from the sky.”
The burden of proof is on you, Matthew. Many, many claims of the existence of “psi” have been shown to be bogus, so I give further claims of that nature very little credence. Either tell us about a repeatable experiment—copy a few paragraphs from that book if you have to—or we’re going to ignore you.
both groups thought the article was hostile to their positions
They might both be correct about that.
::threadjack::
The probability for anything is non-zero.
I’d be willing to assign zero probability to mathematical falsehoods, such as “2+2=5”.
On topic:
Apparently, a lot of people really don’t understand biological evolution.
(Many people don’t really understand what a physicist means by a “wave”, either, but they tend to be familiar with examples.)
Q. Where do priors originally come from?
A. Never ask that question.
Hmmm...
What isn’t emergence? Well, on a trivial level, everything observable is a consequence of physics. So, is there anything observable that does not fall into the category of “physics”, and does that make the category meaningless?
I think I can come up with some things that “emergence” is not.
If X is not “emergent”, then: a) X does not have a cellular automata-like model; there are no readily identifiable components of X that follow relatively simple, computable rules which generate the observed behavior of the system. (The game of tennis doesn’t look like an emergent property of any of its obvious components, unless you decide that tennis emerges from human brains.) OR b) X does not have a high-level model that describes the overall behavior of X without modeling the behavior of each individual component of X separately. (A list of telephone numbers is not emergent.)
People probably do use “emergent property” as a placeholder for “something caused by something else, but I don’t understand how” far too often, though.
At some point, one does get down to first principles. Remember Newton’s answer to “Why gravity”? It was “I make no hypothesis.” If you ask “why” enough times, you eventually run out of answers. The modern explanation of “Why gravity?” is curved space-time, but “why curved space-time” is as good a question as “why gravity.” At some point, you run out of justifications, and the only answer you can give becomes “Here is a model that makes accurate predictions.”
(Does that make any sense?)
You can actually give a semi-plausible justification of special relativity based on what was known in 1901. Maxwell’s equations are fundamentally incompatible with what I might call “Newtonian relativity.” They define a fixed speed for light, which is impossible in Newtonian relativity for observers in different inertial reference frames. Magnetism is also a puzzle, as the magnetism depends on the relative velocity in a way that makes it appear to create different forces in different inertial frames. Without length contraction from special relativity, magnetism has uncomfortable implications.
Of all the events in the 20th century that would have been “absurd” by the standards of the 19th century, not a single one—to the best of our knowledge—violated the law of conservation of energy, which was known in 1850.
::nitpick:: Nuclear reactions violate the 1850s version of the law of conservation of energy. We get around that today by redefining mass as a kind of energy via Einstein’s famous equation E=mc^2.
Transmutation of chemical elements? Absurd! ::end nitpick::
Supposedly, Bill Gates never actually said that...
Dogbert’s advice on how to (get paid to) predict the future:
Assume all positive trends will continue indefinitely. Assume all negative trends are about to end.
I’m a very honest person. I never tell a lie without believing it first. ;)
And while we’re on the subject, I would feel rather patronized—like a dog commanded to perform a trick—if someone presented me with a painting and said, “Say something mathematical!”
Well, the answer to that might be, “Give me some time, and I might find something interesting to say about it.”
What can mathematics say about paintings? The ancient Greeks probably thought a lot about things like that; you could talk about proportion and perspective and things like that, I guess. You could perform more a detailed analysis if you digitize the image and break it up into elements that aren’t obvious from a purely visual inspection, such as overall contrast levels.
I do like g’s suggestion, though.
What’s wrong with group selection? All you need is for the benefit to the individual of being in a group in which trait X is sufficiently common to be sufficiently bigger than the benefit of not having trait X in the individual… or am I confused?
This is off-topic, but… watch this video.
Are the audience members really that stupid, or are they just liars?
1.0 is a probability. According to the axioms of probability theory, for any A, P(A or (not A))=1. (Unless you’re an intuitionist/constructivist who rejects the principle that not(not A) implies A, but that’s beyond the scope of this discussion.)
Thank you for the latest release of gradewrecker. My GPA just went in the corner and shot itself. —USENET posting, author unknown