Date: Wed, 12 Nov 1997 01:49:15 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: perhaps@yes.no (Eivind Eklund) Cc: nate@mt.sri.com, perhaps@yes.no, tlambert@primenet.com, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Newest Pentium bug (fatal) Message-ID: <199711120149.SAA19930@usr04.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <199711112339.AAA23291@bitbox.follo.net> from "Eivind Eklund" at Nov 12, 97 00:39:29 am
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> > predictable. Asking for 'scientific' provable information from human > > beings, let alone God (or gods) is asking for a chaotic system to become > > non-chaotic. > > I disagree that humans are a non-predictable system. There is chaos, > sure, but there are clearly predictable properties. Which information > people have is one; health is another. (Discussed below) The entire history of science is the conversion of "chaotic" systems into predictable systems. The only thing that chaos truly describes is that for which we have yet to derive a predictive model. Plague propagation used to be called "chaotic". Now we know that it's not, etc.. > There is a couple of cases where you even can't use statistics: Where > your measurement will impact the experiment so much that the result > won't be valid, Observer effect is overrated, ever since Schrodinger's Cat linked a quantum event to a macrocosmic event. It was a Gendanken Experiment. The only thing the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states is that you can not know both the position and momentum of an electron at the same time within h-bar/2 (the significance of this is that for events occurring in under one Planck Length, all known conservation laws (*not* all *physical* laws) may be ignored. Such events are still subject to statistical prediction; if they were not, we wouldn't know the shape of electron orbitals, and we wouldn't have an explanation for electron tunneling, etc.. 8-). > and the case where it is too expensive to create an experiment. Yes. If you ware willing to give me 7 ten ton masses, and let me put six at one end of the solar system such that they describe the largest number of three point planes it's possible for them to describe (ie: place them in a squared Spiral Of Archimedes), and then accellerate the other one from one side to the other to a significant fraction of the speed of light, so that it's path intersected the intersection of two of the planes and intersected a third at a place where it did *not* intersect with another plane, and you let me have mututal optical interferometry between the six so I could know ther relativistically invariant spacial seperation, I could tell you *definitively*, once and for all, whether Einstein was right or wrong about gravity and its speed of propagation. Currently, I have to believe he's wrong, since no one has detected a gravity wave yet... nevertheless, his work remains a useful approximation. ;-). > I've not said they don't exist - I'm just saying I've never seen any > data that I need to resort to a God to be able to explain. Thus I > choose what I consider the simpler hypothesis - that there isn't any. > This is not something I'm 100% fixed on - it is just my present > hypothesis. I'd change my hypothesis come data to the contrary. This is the position of Occam's Razor and the scientific method as well: do not accept without evidence, and do not dismiss without evidence to the contrary. You've got to enjoy anything that can reliably result in light bulbs, 10 times out of 10. 8-). > This is interesting. I'd need more information about the experiment > before I could say anything about it - what immediately pop up as > things that would need to be checked is > > Was this done as a proper double-blind study? Heh. The first question in my mind, as well. How many prayers were directed at rooms containing cardiac training dummies? How did you get the families of the non-test subjects to not pray for them, and thus damage the experiment? 8-) 8-). > If all of those were answered to my satisfaction, and preferably the > same results were replicated by researchers with different biases, I'd > say the results are significant. However, my first hunch wouldn't be > that the results indicate that there is a god - my first hunch would > be that they indicate working telepathy and through that, placebo > effect. It would still be a significant result. Well, that *would* be the simpler explanation. 8-). At that point, I'd design experiments based on language barriers between the pray-er's and the pray-ee's (is it still effective if people who speak only Chinese pray for someone who only speaks English? Are some languages better to pray in?), and on the religion of the pary-er's (is it better to have 10 Catholics pray for you, or 6 Jehovah's witnesses, 2 Protestants, a Rabbi, and a Scientologist?), their prior association (ie: can I recruit any 10 Baptists, or do they have to be Baptists who all attend the same church?), their "religiousness", as measured by the tenets of their faith (do Mormons who drink coffee have a higher or lower success rate than those who don't? What if you give them a placebo instead of real coffee?), and their position (can I get the same effect from one priest that I get from 3 parishoners?). And so on. 8-). Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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