Where Science Went Wrong (hilarious web site)

On May 6, 11:57*pm, (David Goldfarb) wrote:
In article ,
Michael Grosberg wrote:

Strangely, this is the second "Less Wrong" article I ran into in the
last hour. The first was a piece of supposed Harry Potter fan fiction
(I think it's just using the HP-verse to explore some argument in
narrative form) I ran into in the comment section in Charles Stross'
blog.

No, your parenthesis is quite wrong. *Yudkowsky is doing nothing less
than rewriting _Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone_ from top
to bottom, changing things so that they're more pleasing to him.

I'm working my way through it now.It's brilliant - yesterday it kept
me awake up until 2:00 AM. The reason I'm wary of calling it fan is
fiction because of the "fan" part of fan fiction, not because it
wasn't proper fiction. Yudkowsky takes everything the readers of HP
(and Rowling herself) hold dear, and smashes it to little pieces, sets
it on fire, then stomps on the remains, singing a happy tune all the
while. I love it, but then I'm not a Rowling fan, only read that first
book and didn;t like it much.

Michael Grosberg wrote:
On May 6, 11:57 pm, (David Goldfarb) wrote:
In article ,
Michael Grosberg wrote:

Strangely, this is the second "Less Wrong" article I ran into in the
last hour. The first was a piece of supposed Harry Potter fan fiction
(I think it's just using the HP-verse to explore some argument in
narrative form) I ran into in the comment section in Charles Stross'
blog.
No, your parenthesis is quite wrong. Yudkowsky is doing nothing less
than rewriting _Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone_ from top
to bottom, changing things so that they're more pleasing to him.

I'm working my way through it now.It's brilliant - yesterday it kept
me awake up until 2:00 AM. The reason I'm wary of calling it fan is
fiction because of the "fan" part of fan fiction, not because it
wasn't proper fiction.

You're either a fan or a masochist to do that much work over a series.


--
Sea Wasp
/^\
;;;
Live Journal: http://seawasp.livejournal.com

On May 6, 6:41*pm, trag wrote:
On May 6, 9:31 am, Chris L Peterson wrote:

I do think a case can be made that scientists are more fit to rule than
non-scientists (as a very broad generalization only, of course). That's
because scientists have a rational way of thinking that is clearly
beneficial. The question, of course, comes down to whether they lack
some other equally important skill, such as diplomacy (again, broadly
generalizing). My own view is that rational, clear thinking probably
outweighs other factors, but who's to know for sure?

My experience is that while (some) scientists may have a rational way
of thinking within their specialty, most of them do not apply that
skill outside their specialty. * At the very least, this is true of
most of the engineers I've worked with.

I knew a mathematician who believed in astrology and filled lottery
tickets, always with the numbers 1-2-3-4-5...n, as they were exactly
as probable as any other combination. Which is true, but
a. If these number ever came out in a draw, accusations of cheating
would disqualify the results
and
b. If you're so good in calculating probabilities what are you doing
buying lotery ticklets in the first place?

I wish I knew him better, I never really figured out if the astrology
thing was true belief or just an affectation.

Chris L Peterson wrote:
On Thu, 6 May 2010 07:01:15 -0700 (PDT), Quadibloc
wrote:

Of course, also, this sort of thing is anti-democratic. If a
scientific priesthood could protect us from being blown up in a
nuclear war started by politicians, it would be a good thing. But
there were _scientists_ among those who had the silly idea that the
world would benefit from Stalin having the atomic bomb too instead of
just the United States. Which pretty much rubbishes the theory that
scientists are more fit to rule than even people like Ronald Reagan
and George W. Bush... when they, unlike the scientists, are at least
kept on a leash by the electorate.

Well, it isn't clear if the world is or is not better off for Stalin
having the bomb. We can't do an experiment and see. The question is
inherently non-scientific, so there is no reason to think that
scientists should make a better (or worse) decision when a question like
it arises.

It is hard to tell. Once the nuclear cat was out of the bag it was
inevitable that the UK, France, Russia and China would catch up. Klaus
Fuchs allowed the Russians to skip some development work, but their top
scientists were no slouches no matter what US propaganda might say.

Andrei Sakharov for instance who later became a peace activist was
instrumental in their H-bomb design and later in cosmology.

I do think a case can be made that scientists are more fit to rule than
non-scientists (as a very broad generalization only, of course). That's

I think scientists (and engineers) with a few notable exceptions see
things too much in black and white and are extremely bad at dealing with
cheats and liars. The latter is essential in the real world as diplomacy
seldom involves telling the truth and is very much closer to poker.

If Edward Teller had been President or even just slightly more
influential during the Cuban missile crisis the Earth would quite likely
be a smouldering radioactive ruin by now. We had a lucky escape that
President Kennedy ignored his paranoid hawkish advisers advice to "nuke
the Godless cormie *******s to Kingdome Come".

A comparison of Sakharov and Teller makes interesting reading. They each
did the crucial theoretical work to make H-bombs for roughly the same
reason but their characters were extremely different. See for example:

http://gadfly.igc.org/papers/sakharov.htm

A comparison slightly biassed in Sakharovs favour but not by much.

because scientists have a rational way of thinking that is clearly
beneficial. The question, of course, comes down to whether they lack
some other equally important skill, such as diplomacy (again, broadly
generalizing). My own view is that rational, clear thinking probably
outweighs other factors, but who's to know for sure?

My instinct is that scientists rational approach makes them too
predictable for an optimum result. Game theorists and magicians can run
rings round scientists using sleight of hand.

Remember the famous endorsement of Uri Geller by Prof John Taylor?

http://www.urigeller.com/books/geller-papers/g19.htm

It was odd that the Amazing Randi could duplicate most of these results
without paranormal abilities and that Uri Geller could not do mind over
matter tricks on experiments designed by the magician.

Regards,
Martin Brown

"Michael Grosberg" wrote in message
...

I knew a mathematician who believed in astrology and filled lottery
tickets, always with the numbers 1-2-3-4-5...n, as they were exactly
as probable as any other combination. Which is true, but
a. If these number ever came out in a draw, accusations of cheating
would disqualify the results

That seems highly unlikely to me. If no one had tha ticket when that
particular number was "drawn", then there would be no complaints of cheating
because there would be no winner. If there were ticket holders, invalidating
the result on whim would lead to lawsuits immediately. How would the lottery
officials then demonstrate that the results were not correct?



Brian

In article , Martin Brown writes:
Chris L Peterson wrote:
On Thu, 6 May 2010 07:01:15 -0700 (PDT), Quadibloc wrote:

Of course, also, this sort of thing is anti-democratic. If a
scientific priesthood could protect us from being blown up in a
nuclear war started by politicians, it would be a good thing. But

Well, it isn't clear if the world is or is not better off for Stalin
having the bomb. We can't do an experiment and see. The question is
inherently non-scientific, so there is no reason to think that
scientists should make a better (or worse) decision when a question like
it arises.

Andrei Sakharov for instance who later became a peace activist was
instrumental in their H-bomb design and later in cosmology.

According to Kip Thorne, some of the statements/questions from
Sakharov in the cosmology area gave Western physicists a strong
hint as to what areas of H-bomb design he was looking into at
the time.

--
Michael F. Stemper
#include Standard_Disclaimer
Build a man a fire, and you warm him for a day. Set him on fire,
and you warm him for a lifetime.

On Fri, 07 May 2010 12:03:27 +0100, Martin Brown
wrote:

Chris L Peterson wrote:

Well, it isn't clear if the world is or is not better off for Stalin
having the bomb. We can't do an experiment and see. The question is
inherently non-scientific, so there is no reason to think that
scientists should make a better (or worse) decision when a question like
it arises.

It is hard to tell. Once the nuclear cat was out of the bag it was
inevitable that the UK, France, Russia and China would catch up. Klaus
Fuchs allowed the Russians to skip some development work, but their top
scientists were no slouches no matter what US propaganda might say.

My father worked on the Manhattan Project as a very junior scientist,
and he never believed all the paranoia and propaganda about "Soviet
atom spies," to the point he wasn't entirely sure there WERE any. He
said that once you knew a bomb COULD be built, actually doing it just
wasn't that big a challenge, and certainly wasn't too much for the
Soviets to figure out. They weren't stupid.

(Yes, I know the Soviets really did steal the information, but when
Dad was talking about this forty-five years ago that wasn't yet
established beyond all reasonable doubt. American propaganda was
usually less blatantly false than what the other side produced, but it
still wasn't very trustworthy.)

(Incidentally, Dad did part-time work translating Russian scientific
and technical articles from 1945 to 1980, and he said the Soviets were
behind us in most fields, but beat the crap out of the West in
optics.)





--
My webpage is at http://www.watt-evans.com
I'm selling my comic collection -- see http://www.watt-evans.com/comics.html
I'm serializing a novel at http://www.watt-evans.com/realmsoflight0.html

Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:

He said that once you knew a bomb COULD be built, actually doing it just
wasn't that big a challenge, [...]

Lots of things are that way. If you know it can be done, that seems
to be the most uphill part of the battle. If you know it can't be
done, there's little point in trying.

Of course we -know- that the speed of light is an absolute boundary.

[Which personally I think is irrelevant since running into a small
object at even a significant fraction of lightspeed would be plenty to
screw up your day, and small multiples of lightspeed are still too
slow to go much of anywhere in a reasonable subjective time.]

If you -know- a thing can be done, that is one thing. If you -assume-
it can be done, that's another thing. Given the amount of stuff men
have "known" in the past, and learned later to be false, it makes one
wonder why assuming a thing can be done doesn't give the same boost
that "knowing" it does.

--
ewe spik flensh?

: "noRm d. plumBeR"
: Lots of things are that way. If you know it can be done, that seems
: to be the most uphill part of the battle. If you know it can't be
: done, there's little point in trying.
:
: Of course we -know- that the speed of light is an absolute boundary.

In much the same way, and with much the same class of justification,
that we know the laws of thermodynamics hold true. So, manufacturing
energy from literally nothing (not even the "vacuum energy") is just
about as likely as exceeding lightspeed.

And, interestingly enough, cosmological inflation pretty much
involves violating both of those, at least functionally.

So... I guess my point is, "you can get from point A to point B FTL" and
"you can sustain a chain reaction" are two very very very very different
kinds of "can be done"s (or, conversely, before they are done, "can't
be done"s). And to note that in some relevant ways, we *don't* know
that the speed of light is an absolute boundary (depending on precisely
what phenomenon you're talking about). Points. My *two* points are...

: If you -know- a thing can be done, that is one thing. If you -assume-
: it can be done, that's another thing. Given the amount of stuff men
: have "known" in the past, and learned later to be false, it makes one
: wonder why assuming a thing can be done doesn't give the same boost
: that "knowing" it does.

There are, of course, some science fiction stories about that.
One such yasid is from Analog in the '70s, where a guy buys a bunch
of weird mad-scientist-lair widgetry for his... well, for his lair
in a disused coal mine, and by and by, the whole thing blows up in a
many-tens-of-kilotons-TNT explosion. Examining his notes, the government
discovered he'd been working on some nuclear phenomenon which should have
lots of practical applications such as portable nuclear power generators,
and started a big project to duplicate the work (but more carefully,
of course). Turns out that the guy *thought* his notions would lead
to those applications, but he didn't have the resources to do it.
And couldn't get a grant, or anybody to listen to him. But he *did*
have the resources to set up shop in an abandoned coal mine (abandoned
not because there was no more coal, but because it was non-economical
to continue mining), grind up kilotons of coal dust dispersed into the
confined atmosphere in the mine over a long time, and light a match.

And then of course there's Heinlein's "Methuselah's Children", where the
world government believes the Howard Families have the secret of extreme
longevity, and when they escape, they reverse engineer it and come up
with the "secret" themselves. Neveryoumind that the Howard Families
had no such secret...

And so on and so forth.

But the thing is, the speed of light "barrier" is not the same kind of
thing as chain reactions, the sound barrier, longevity, or many another
"impossibility" which turned out not to be impossible. Don't confuse
impossibilities of the first kind (impossible for reasons of basic theory,
like energy conservation, or lightspeed invariance) and impossibilities
of the second kind (impossible for reasons of engineering difficulty,
like the sound barrier or reaching the moon). And then there's
impossibilities of the third kind, where nobody really said them,
like "bumblebees can't fly".

The boundaries between the categories aren't razor sharp, and things that
are only engineering-difficult can masquerade as theory-difficult (eg,
the bit that was common in some early space opera, where you can't have
a heat ray that heats the target hotter than the emitter, for reasons
of optics and thermodynamics... and then you have the laser to show
it wrong; and another example, the bit about cosmic inflation above),
and some ambiguity whether something like the sound "barrier" is of the
second kind or third kind). Plus a bit of difficulty as to where
to fit things like "continental drift is implausible, but
plate tectonics is OK".

But on the whole, very useful distinction to keep in mind, imo.
Because it's a regular ploy to cite cases of the second kind as support
for confidence that cases of the first kind will eventually be resolved,
if only people would stop being such negative nellies.

Just lumping all "impossibilities" together is counterproductive.
In the sense that it leads one not to make a probable-return-on-
investment judgment ... judiciously.


"You can't beat Captain Implausible. It's impossible!"
--- Pinhead Pierre, from Phineas and Ferb episode "Out of Toon"


Wayne Throop http://sheol.org/throopw

"noRm d. plumBeR" wrote in message
...
If you -know- a thing can be done, that is one thing. If you -assume-
it can be done, that's another thing. Given the amount of stuff men
have "known" in the past, and learned later to be false, it makes one
wonder why assuming a thing can be done doesn't give the same boost
that "knowing" it does.

To bring it to on-topic for RASFW, there has been at least one SF
tale(Raymond F Jones' short story "Noise Level") that featured convincing
scientists that something was doable in order to get them to replicate it.
But the "evidence" was faked.



Brian