[FRIAM] 'dice' or 'approximation', does it matter?
I've been meaning to do some new digging on Einstein's enigmatic complaint.In a recent program on Channel 13 (I think, but I can't locate it now) a recognized physicist portrayed Einstein as unable to accept uncertainty in nature, and that view seems to be becoming one of the prevalent understandings of the issue (see Wiki link below). On the face of it, since Einstein was a founder of statistical physics, it seems unlikely. God doesn't roll dice, is about something else. One of the things I finally found today to expose the deeper issue was Niels Bohr's long, polite, emphatic last-word on the subject (Bohr 1949). Bohr says that what Einstein objected to in QM was the elimination of causality and continuity. Yet, a certain difference in attitude and outlook remained, since, with his mastery for coordinating apparently contrasting experience without abandoning continuity and causality, Einstein was perhaps more reluctant to renounce such ideals than someone for whom renunciation in this respect appeared to be the only way open to proceed with the immediate task. Curiously, the violations of theory or nature expected by both sides in this long debate don't seem to have turned up in the many decades of argument and experiment. QM works fine, so apparently the bizarre way in which QM treats physical events as occurring without taking any time or involving any process, i.e. abstractly following rules in the complete absence of any means for doing so, doesn't matter.Both Einstein's (impossible) and Bohr's (necessary) views on the matter seem to have been simply wrong. I guess my preference is the conservative approach. If it doesn't matter whether the disconnects of nature expressed by our best tool are physical or informational, there's no need to argue about it (i.e. within the 'shut up and calculate' school of thinking).The matter is far from settled, I realize, since provocative proofs like those of Bell's hypothesis seem to support the idea that QM's weirdness is physically real. That real weirdness still appears to be entirely contained, and to not violate causality and continuity anywhere other that within QM, however. Where I think it may ultimately matter is in encouraging the idea generally that nature functions as a set of abstract rules without processes, rather than through incompletely understood physical processes which our rules approximate. I think whether you interpret nature is physical or informational on a macro scale probably matters a lot. The two models at least appear functionally different and need to be looked at. The central problem I see with interpreting physical events as a function of rules is that those rules need to either refer to definable things, or to have a player. I don't think either of those is demonstrable as a generality, and the opposite is much more the usual appearance of the problem. Is there anywhere it would really matter, one way or another? - Niels Bohr 1949 Discussion with Einstein on epistemological problems in atomic physics. http://minerva.tau.ac.il/physics/bsc/3/3144/bohr.pdf - Wiki link - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein Einstein never rejected probabilistic techniques and thinking, in and of themselves. Einstein himself was a great statistician, [19] using statistical analysis in his works on Brownian motion and photoelectricity and in papers published before 1905; Einstein had even discovered Gibbs ensembles. According to the majority of physicists, however, he believed that indeterminism constituted a criteria for strong objection to a physical theory. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Friam Digest, Vol 38, Issue 3
Gee, what you seem to be giving good evidence for is high paid professional 'quasi-scientific' consulting that is disasterously incompetent. Now, I'm sure to object less to messed up plans and research from people who share my personal prejudices. But isn't what's been happening amount to a lot of people planning and acting boldly on seriously misinformed models? I mean really, when you look at those duplicate completely fake and irrational charts you so nicely identified, how could any kind of measure to be made of them at all? How do you model brains full of made up nonsense?? I think modeling is out of reach, but story telling may not be. Telling the stories of how complex events can be read or misread would be a real service. Then again, what if we just decided to spend an equal amount of money figuring out how to get along with people as on destroying them. That would be novel. The last time I checked killing people pisses their friends off, especially when they are seen as defending the religious honor of a whole people, though I haven't seen any official studies. Who knows, perhaps an eye for an eye is just incorrect. We should study this. Maybe the requirement for being a descent neighbor is to unilaterally NOT return insults... or some thing like that. Sorry for the sarcasm, but that RAND poop just plain pisses me off. Phil Henshaw .·´ ¯ `·. ~~~ 680 Ft. Washington Ave NY NY 10040 tel: 212-795-4844 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] explorations: www.synapse9.com -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Marcus G. Daniels Sent: Sunday, August 06, 2006 3:13 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Friam Digest, Vol 38, Issue 3 Phil Henshaw wrote: It seems to have been an error to trust our gut feelings about that, but we got worked up and did it anyway. Potentially complex system theory could design measures to give people an outside view of these things we get swept up in. Here are a couple of documents describing counter terrorism strategy of the White House: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/050425/25roots_3.htm http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/02/counter_terror ism/counter_terrorism_strategy.pdf Compare page 13 in the latter (as labeled in pages of the document, or 15 in the page selector) with this RAND project, e.g. page 11 (page 19 in the page selector). http://www.rand.org/pubs/conf_proceedings/2005/RAND_CF212.pdf Five pages later, some marker issues are listed that locate Islamic groups ideologically, namely democracy, human rights, Shari'a law vs. civil law, rights of minorities, status of women, legal rights, public participation, segregation, and lifestyle issues. The next page goes on to describe examples of different groups on this spectrum and then gives suggestions on how to use it in a divide and conquer propaganda battle for the hearts and minds of Islamic moderates. These sorts of ideas could be extended into agent models to think about the rates at which such aid and propaganda efforts might progress or backfire. Searching some newspapers or blogs could give some ideas on how such efforts are likely to be resented, e.g. http://zeitgeistgirl.blogspot.com/2004_04_01_zeitgeistgirl_arc hive.html. In contrast, in today's New York Times, the front page has an article on Hezbollah, _Holding a Gun, Lending a Hand_, which describes the loyalty of Hezbollah fighters due to the support given to them and their families by the organization. Seems like US aid could undermine terrorist organizations by doing better at the same job. All these forces could be considered in an agent model. It probably wouldn't matter if such a simulation had 1e4 or 1e7 agents of different persuasions, but rather the mixing ratios of just enough agents so that the dynamics would be the smooth and similar in a larger simulation of similar demographics for the same relative configuration. Personally, I'd rather have political scientists and technical people developing crude models of various international stability situations than flushing billions of tax dollars down the drain on a gut feeling Maybe provide real time updates to one of those CNN ticker lines showing odds of success, cumulative cost, and expected value. :-) Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at
Re: [FRIAM] Friam Digest, Vol 38, Issue 3
Phil Henshaw wrote: I think modeling is out of reach, but story telling may not be. Telling the stories of how complex events can be read or misread would be a real service. There will be policy makers and I think it is safe to say they'll find it easier to convince people of their policies if there are some dramatic stories involved (e.g. 9/11, WMDs). I expect a careful and restrained story of the kind you describe above will be overwhelmed in general by story tellers at think tanks like the Project for the New American Century who don't hesitate to provide `leadership' (Perle, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld). On a technical note, I don't buy that social simulations would be computationally prohibitive, given the will. The fastest general purpose supercomputer at Livermore is $100e6 U.S. (BlueGene/L) having 130k processors. Suppose a simulation ran for a day, that's still 130k simulations a day. That's a lot of sensitivity analysis one could do. It might take 10 teams of modelers to keep such a machine busy. For national security, what's a $100 million here or there? The 2006 budget for Advanced Simulation and Computing Initiative computing was $661 million and $6.3 billion overall for stockpile stewardship. Yet I keep hearing that `non-state actors' the new threat.. How do you model brains full of made up nonsense?? Detectives, trial lawyers, and spies tease out models from deceptive people and suboptimal evidence. No shame in formalizing these models, if only to make it clear what is far from being known. And to deal with a culture that only wants compliance and to stay `on message' all I can suggest is to 1) stomach it, and 2) slowly bend the message in some other direction. Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] 'dice' or 'approximation', does it matter?
On Sun, Aug 06, 2006 at 12:39:05PM -0400, phil henshaw wrote: I've been meaning to do some new digging on Einstein's enigmatic complaint.In a recent program on Channel 13 (I think, but I can't locate it now) a recognized physicist portrayed Einstein as unable to accept uncertainty in nature, and that view seems to be becoming one of the prevalent understandings of the issue (see Wiki link below). On the face of it, since Einstein was a founder of statistical physics, it seems unlikely. God doesn't roll dice, is about something else. One of the things I finally found today to expose the deeper issue was Niels Bohr's long, polite, emphatic last-word on the subject (Bohr 1949). Bohr says that what Einstein objected to in QM was the elimination of causality and continuity. I think's Einstein's reaction is symptomatic of a belief that there is a totally objective point of view. In Complexity and Emergence I argue that this belief gets in the way of understanding the notions of complexity and emergence. The Quantum story is telling us the same thing - that there is no observer independent point of view - at best we have overlapping subjective points of view, and physics is about characterising the the overlapping parts (I also take this as the message of Vic Stenger's new book Comprehensible Cosmos, although Vic himself is a little too old school for this interpretation). Cheers -- *PS: A number of people ask me about the attachment to my email, which is of type application/pgp-signature. Don't worry, it is not a virus. It is an electronic signature, that may be used to verify this email came from me if you have PGP or GPG installed. Otherwise, you may safely ignore this attachment. A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 8308 3119 (mobile) Mathematics0425 253119 () UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australiahttp://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks International prefix +612, Interstate prefix 02 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
