Agreed. I think what Lanier should have said that a perception of magic is a subset of things one doesn’t understand, rather than claiming that they are equal. Bugs that I am currently hunting but haven’t nailed down are things I don’t understand, but they certainly don’t seem magical.
soreff
Karma: 729
Was the context one where Waterhouse was proving a conditional, “if axioms A, B, C, then theorem Z”, or one where where he was trying to establish Z as a truth about the world, and therefore also had the burden of showing that axioms A, B, C were supported by experimental evidence?
One of the parts of “liquid water is wet” is that a droplet of it will spread out on many common surfaces—salt, paper, cotton, etc. Yes, it is a bit tricky to unpack what is meant by”wet”—perhaps some other properties, like not withstanding shear are also folded in—but I don’t think that it is just a tautology, with “wet” being defined as the set of properties that liquid water has.
Re the catch/count/mark/release/recapture/count puzzle—the degree to which that is feasible depends on how well one can do (reasonably) unbiased sampling. I’m skeptical that that will work well with the set of testable statements that one is automatically certain of.
Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.
There is a very large amount of stuff that one is automatically certain of that is correct, though trivial, data like “liquid water is wet”. I’m not sure how one would even practically quantify an analysis of what fraction of the statements one is certain of are or are not true. Even if one could efficiently test them, how would one list them (in the current state of science—tracing a full human neural network (and then converting its beliefs into a list of testable statements) is beyond our current capabilities).
Agreed. If nothing else, in a bargaining process, keeping the maximum/minimum price that one would accept private during the negotiation doesn’t fit into either category.
The empirical evidence that is in the link from Gunnar_Zarncke’s post is:
And throughout the book’s description of these events, there was one constant:
All of the white people who joined Indian tribes loved it and refused to go back to white civilization. All the Indians who joined white civilization hated it and did everything they could to go back to their previous tribal lives.
This is not just from introspection.
Can one use the backwards-E existence symbol as one of the letters?
And what is the probability that one of them is a Prior?
Concern about sociopaths applies to both business and government:
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/01/09/3140081/bridge-sociopathy/
One paper examining a sizable sample of business folk found that percentage of sociopaths in the corporate world is 3.5 times higher than in the general population. Another study of 346 white-collar workers found that the percentage of corporate sociopaths increased as you go up the corporate ladder. That’s consistent with the reasons why politicians tend to be sociopaths: corporate leaders have lots of power over others and arguably even less need for empathy and conscience than politicians.
Interesting question. I’m a programmer who works in EDA software, including using transistor-level simulations, and I use surprisingly little math. Knowing the idea of a derivative (and how noisy numerical approximations to them can be!) is important—but it is really rare for me to actually compute one. It is reasonably common to run into a piece of code that reverses the transformation done by another pieces of code, but that is about it. The core algorithms of the simulators involves sophisticated math—but that is stable and encapsulated, so it is mostly a black box. As a citizen, statistics are potentially useful, but mostly just at the level of: This article quotes an X% change in something with N patients, does it look like N was large enough that this could possibly be statistically significant? But usually the problem with such studies in the the systematic errors, which are essentially impossible for a casual examination to find.
I don’t know, but it sounds similar to “It’s smarter to be lucky than it’s lucky to be smart.”
suggest that those with the power to wield nuclear weapons have in fact been more morally responsible than we give them credit.
Perhaps. Alternatively, when faced with a similarly-armed opponent, even our habitually bloody rulers can be detered by the prospect of being personally burned to death with nuclear fire.
And with 542 survivals, assuming Poisson statistics, the one-sigma bounds are around +-4% of that. I’ll believe Spock most significant figure, but not the other three. :-)
Maxwell’s equations fit in roughly 40 characters.
In particular if the success of something you opposed seemed inevitable, you’d still oppose it.
Oppose in the sense of “actively work to stop it” or oppose in the sense of, “if asked about it, note that one dislikes it”? I dislike the increase of surveillance over the decades but look: Sensors get cheaper year by year. Computation gets cheaper year by year. I’m not happy to see more surveillance, but I see it as so close to inevitable, due to the dropping costs of the enabling technologies, that actively opposing it is a waste of time and effort.
To put it another way: In the original C.S.Lewis quote, Lewis includes in his own list of questions that he wants asked: “Is it possible?” I view most of the questions that Lewis disapproves of as just being ways of asking whether recent historical evidence make something look possible or impossible in the near future. In my view, usually, claims of historical inevitability are overstated, but, occasionally (as in the cheaper sensors example), I think there are situations where a fairly solid case for at least likely trends can be made.
Whether that is good advice or not depends on the evidence already in hand, and the difficulty of the experiment. Will ice survive heating to a million kelvin at standard pressure?
Is that descriptive or normative?
Not for all aspects of reality. Some require very extreme conditions (like large, complex physics experiments like the LHC) to hit.
One of the things that other people do is to build standard parts. If one has an unlimited budget, one can ignore them, and build everything in a project from optimized custom parts. This is rare.
Or that the interval between X and Y is spacelike, and neither is in the other’s forward light cone… :)