Where Science Went Wrong (hilarious web site)

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

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.

My sense of things is different. Most of the scientists I know actually
have a very good sense of how things work, they are much less "black and
white" than most non-scientists I know, and seem to have a good
understanding of human nature.

To be more clear with respect to what I said earlier, I'm not suggesting
that most scientists would make good leaders, anymore than most
non-scientists. All I'm really saying is that I think it is possible,
even likely, that a person with good leadership potential who has been a
working scientist may be better than one who has some other skill set,
say law or medicine (if lawyers generally make bad politicians,
physicians seem to be worse).

The few successful lawyers I've seen in politics didn't do such a bad
job. Less so for doctors, but it's not all that easy to tell whether a
doctor was any good or not. On the whole, (and there will be a lot of
exceptions to this) politics seems to attract people - lawyers, doctors,
teachers, business people... who were not actually very good at their
profession. Strangely enough, when they leave, most of them seem to step
straight into a directorship.

--

Rob Bannister

(Wayne Throop) wrote:

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".

Nor I think did anyone really in the know think the 'sound barrier'
was some kind of unbreakable wall - like the 'unsinkable' Titanic,
that was largely a creation of the media that has taken hold in the
public imagination despite an utter lack of foundation.

By the time we attempted controlled manned supersonic flight, we'd
already had ballistic umanned supersonic flight for decades if not
centuries - E.G. bullets.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

http://derekl1963.livejournal.com/

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL

Default User wrote:
"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?

He is also not a particularly smart mathematician either. Every possible
combination of numbers is equally likely to to occur but sucker bets
based on birthdays and house numbers mean that numbers above 31 are to
be preferred if you do not want to share the prize. 42 is also worth
avoiding thanks to H2G2.

If the draw includes mostly numbers under 32 then the jackpot is
typically shared by many people due to this effect. If the numbers are
mostly 32 or higher then a jackpot rollover is more likely.

The Irish lottery famously managed to have too many small prizes and a
team of mathematicians came up with a syndicate to hoover them up and
win the jackpot periodically with a net profit each time around.

Regards,
Martin Brown

Martin Brown wrote:

The Irish lottery famously managed to have too many small prizes and a
team of mathematicians came up with a syndicate to hoover them up and
win the jackpot periodically with a net profit each time around.

I wondered what had happened with our state lottery. When it first
started, I used to win $10-15 every 3-4 weeks, and then it totally dried
up. I had already guessed it was because of the big syndicates moving
in, but it hadn't occurred to me that they might be using maths.

--

Rob Bannister

In article ,
Martin Brown said:

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".

I'm uncertain that there was enough firepower in the world's
arsenals in late 1962 to accomplish _that_. Are there any serious
studies on what the likely result would have been if the Cuban
missile crisis had gone Bad? (This _has_ to have been hashed out in
soc.history.what-if, though possibly at less than magnificent levels
of scientific vigor.)

-- wds

In article ,
(William December Starr) wrote:

In article ,
Martin Brown said:

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".

I'm uncertain that there was enough firepower in the world's
arsenals in late 1962 to accomplish _that_. Are there any serious
studies on what the likely result would have been if the Cuban
missile crisis had gone Bad? (This _has_ to have been hashed out in
soc.history.what-if, though possibly at less than magnificent levels
of scientific vigor.)

We actually just discussed this in here (rasfw), although I can't
remember the thread name.

The USSR's arsenal at the time was extremely small, and their arsenal of
stuff that might actually make it to the target (missiles, not slow
bombers) was smaller still. Dozens or hundreds, in the end. The US would
have emerged from the war with the "bloody nose" that the hawks claimed.
(Not that I consider the death of millions of citizens in a day to be a
"bloody nose", but life, for the rest, would have gone on....)

Even at the height of the arms race, when each side had tens of
thousands of warheads, "smouldering radioactive ruin" would have been
the outcome. It would have nicely wrecked both countries and many of
their allies, but decent parts of the world would escape. Haldeman's
Confederacion, formed from Southern Hemisphere powers that escaped the
superpowers' MAD, seems likely.

--
Mike Ash
Radio Free Earth
Broadcasting from our climate-controlled studios deep inside the Moon

In article ,
Mike Ash wrote:

Even at the height of the arms race, when each side had tens of
thousands of warheads, "smouldering radioactive ruin" would have been
the outcome.

Murphy's Law of Perverse Typos strikes again. Of course I meant to say,
would NOT have been the outcome.

--
Mike Ash
Radio Free Earth
Broadcasting from our climate-controlled studios deep inside the Moon

(Derek Lyons) wrote:

Nor I think did anyone really in the know think the 'sound barrier'
was some kind of unbreakable wall - like the 'unsinkable' Titanic,
that was largely a creation of the media that has taken hold in the
public imagination despite an utter lack of foundation.

By the time we attempted controlled manned supersonic flight, we'd
already had ballistic umanned supersonic flight for decades if not
centuries - E.G. bullets.

Whip tips. Test rockets.
--
Tomorrow is today already.
Greg Goss, 1989-01-27

On May 6, 4:39*pm, Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:
On Thu, 06 May 2010 08:31:53 -0600, Chris L Peterson

(trimmed)

Technocracy was one of the political theories that cropped up in the
first half of the 20th century, alongside Fascism, Leninism, etc.

It would have been a complete disaster, the epitome of "I know what's
best for you whether you like it or not" government. *Everywhere the
Technocrats gained any sort of authority (they were too elitist to win
elections, but sometimes got appointed), they made a mess of it.

It could be argued that the sorry state of social sciences at the time
was much of why the Technocrats were either a joke or a disaster, but
there's also the fact that people who go into science and people who
go into government have very different interests and generally don't
develop the skill set that goes with the other field.

A more modest relative of Technocracy is alive, and I suspect is doing
good. This is the handing over of small chunks of function to
specialists in a particular field. The poster child of this is the
independent central bank, given only targets from government and freed
from political interference. Another example was when governments
stepped back from handling detailed negociations on price when selling
wireless spectrum for mobile phones, and called in experts to design
the rules for auctions. In theory, the UK move towards evidence-based
policy, supported by social science and statistical surveys, is also
such a move, although the hard core activists disregarded evidence or
searched for policy-based evidence.

In article , (Wayne Throop) writes:

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).


This is n't an answer to your YASID, but I was struck by the similarities
between this description and some of the events that took place in _Skylark
of Space_.

--
Michael F. Stemper
#include Standard_Disclaimer
Twenty-four hours in a day; twenty-four beers in a case. Coincidence?