Date: Wed, 12 Nov 1997 19:16:41 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: nate@mt.sri.com (Nate Williams) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com, nate@mt.sri.com, freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Newest Pentium bug (fatal) Message-ID: <199711121916.MAA03696@usr09.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <199711121543.IAA03784@rocky.mt.sri.com> from "Nate Williams" at Nov 12, 97 08:43:16 am
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> > > > > Simpler != correct.
> > > >
> > > > We've been here. Simpler == provisionally correct in the absence of
> > > > empirical evidence to the contrarary.
> > >
> > > We've been here, but I don't agree to your 'waving of the hands' that
> > > claims it's provisionally correct.
> >
> > It's a definition for a rule set called the "scientific method".
>
> No, it's not. Again, waving your hands and making bogus claims don't
> make it true.
OK, *you* define "scientific method", and I will show you how it
reduces to "simpler == provisionally correct".
> > > But, the environment is similar enough that in many cases their siblings
> > > are more alike in certain behaviors to one twin than the two are alike.
> >
> > I don't accept this statement without empirical evidence to back it;
> > can you point to the studies that back this up?
>
> I know the girls personally. I went to 5 years of college with them,
> and also know their brother quite well. (*sigh*, I wanted to marry one
> of them, but alas she didn't feel the same way about me....)
So you're claiming to be an impartial observer? 8-)
[ ... insurance companies never seem to fail ... ]
> Actually, in some cases they 'do'. But, they are big enough to swallow
> the losses, cancel the policies for everyone in that area and move
> onto greener pastures. And, they're not relying on random human
> behavior here, but rather very conservative models based on very basic
> built-in values, such as not wanting to die.
The "survival instinct" is not a value, it's a strange attractor.
The reason the insurance companies don't go bankrupt is that they know
the historical accuracy of their models, and the historical drift in
their models over an actuarial period (the period in time between
when they calibrate their model and the time they recalibrate their
model).
Knowing this, they can charge a "worst case scenario".
The reason they make so much money is that the median value is hardly
ever the worst case (and even if it were, they'd only make a minimum
profit, not "no profit" or "negative profit".
> > Yet we cannot observe that which we cannot observe, and therefore we
> > must leave it out of our models if we want them to work at predicting
> > that which we can observe.
>
> You hit the nail on the head. You cannot accurately model that which
> you can not accurately quantify. By George, I think he's got it.
> Science cannot model anything that is not quantifiable, which is one of
> the biggest points I've been trying to make here.
Well, you're preaching to the choir. ;-). Any true scientist will agree
with that last sentence.
> Science cannot even begin to answer all of the questions in life, and
> believing it can/does leaves you in a 2-D world, with a whole other
> dimension missing.
I don't know if I agree with this statement. Is the purpose to have
a provisional answer for all the questions in life until science can
get around to those dark areas you believe are mapped by faith?
> A Sci-Fi writer isn't someone I would consider an authority.
I think you are confusing Hawking with Sagan.
If you could bring Sagan in, though, I'd have to seriously consider
the God hypothesis (even though *he* is a science fiction writer),
what with him being dead and all... God doing a Rich Little imitation
of Sagan is more feasible than God bringing Sagan back, though. ;-).
> > But if we fail at that, then we can take the standard cosmological
> > question by the roots ("where did the universe come from") to its
> > reductio ad absurdum conclusion that it's simpler to say the Universe
> > has always existed (steady state or not) than that God has always
> > existed.
>
> See above. Simpler != correct.
Simpler != Right, but Simpler == provisionally correct.
The reason I keep sticking "provisionally" in front of it is so that
you don't confuse me stating correctness of a hypothesis or theorem
with correctness of a law. I don't think it's possible to use only
a constructivist approach to arrive at "reality" as opposed to only
some set of rules which attempt to model "reality".
On the other hand, no other approach has come anywhere near to
producing the same concrete results as constructivism can. We owe
our entire technology to refinements in the mapping between our models
and what we in our hubris assume is some objective reality.
When I deny your statement "simpler != correct", I'm not saying in
the same breath "complex == wrong". Correctness and rightness are
seperable attributes. The statements are not antithetical.
You can ask someone "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?". When
he says "No", that doesn't mean you can assume that he is continuing
to beat his wife. Your question contains the hidden assumption that
he had started beating his wife. But his "No" answer is correct: to
stop, one must first start, and not having started, one can not have
stopped. Semantically, it's the difference between "past" and "past
perfect" tenses; English doesn't map these well; it's one of the
reasons it's a good language for non-Homonym based puns.
In Fuzzy Logic, this is called "the law of the excluded middle", and
a statement formulated as:
(I) not A implies B
can't be restated as:
(II) not B implies A
since it's possible that:
(III) not B implies C
You can't claim that statement I equals statement II, unless you
can prove that the set (A,B) is a spanning set.
The assumption that statement I equals statement II is called an
"Aristotilain Mean", which is another way of saying "A-ness" and
"B-ness" are seperate qualities, one of which must exist, and
whose presence or basence is conditioned on a single boolean value.
So when I say "simpler == provisionally correct", I'm not attacking
the concept of faith, I'm only stating a rule agreed to by the
constructivist model science has used with so much success.
(Success != Right, either, which should be apparent to any Computer
Scientist... 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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