“Ultimately, most objects, man-made or not are ‘black boxes.’”
OK, I see what you’re getting at.
Three questions about black boxes:
1) Does the input have to be fully known/observable to constitute a black box? When investigating a population of neurons, we can give stimulus to these cells, but we cannot be sure that we are aware of all the inputs they are receiving. So we effectively do not entirely understand the input being given.
2) Does the output have to be fully known/observable to constitute a black box? When we measure the output of a population of neurons, we also cannot be sure of the totality of information being sent out, due to experimental limitations.
3) If one does not understand a system one uses, does that fact alone make that system a black box? In that case there are absolute black boxes, like the human mind, about which complete information is not known, and relative black boxes, like the car or TCP/IP, about which complete information is not known to the current user.
4) What degree of understanding is sufficient for something not to be called a black box?
Depending on how we answer these things, it will determine whether black box comes to mean:
1) Anything that is identifiable as a ‘part’, whose input and output is known but whose intermediate working/processing is not understood. 2) Anything that is identifiable as a ‘part’ whose input, output and/or processing is not understood. 3) Any ‘part’ that is not completely understood (i.e. presuming access to all information) 4) Anything that is not understood by the user at the time 5) Anything that is not FULLY understood by the user at the time.
We will quickly be in the realm where anything and everything on earth is considered to be a black box, if we take the latter definitions. So how can this word/metaphor be most profitably wielded?
A brilliant post with many links to the Yudkowsky Canon. It has just become a bookmark.
One quip: the study which revealed that a majority of research findings were false seemed to rely on a simulation, and on one meta-study performed earlier by the group. Have I understood this correctly?
Perhaps the p for biological experiments should be lower, but my first inclination is to defend the field I work in and its custom of p<0.05 .
Every time I open up an animal for surgery, the animals nerves are lying in slightly different places. There is a different amount of muscle-tissue obscuring the nerve I have to record from. I have to re-manufacture my electrode after every few surgeries. The hook on my electrode is differently shaped each time. When I put the nerve on the electrode, I pull it up with a different amount of force, in a different position, and do a different degree of damage to the nerve’s processes.
Every animal is slightly different, and every surgery goes slightly differently.
Therefore, I think it might be understandable, why I need a p that is higher than a physicists, because if the physicist uses the same stock of materials, he has much less variability in his setup to begin with.