At 03:58 PM 6/6/2005, you wrote:
rmiller wrote:
At 03:01 PM 6/6/2005, Pete Carlton wrote:
(snip)
The point is, there are enough stories published in any year that it
would be a trivial matter to find a few superficial resemblances between
any event and a story that came before it.
Let's look a little closer at the story in terms of gestalts.
On one side we have published author Robert Heinlein writing a story in
1939 about a guy named Silard who works with a uranium bomb, a beryllium
target and a fellow named "lenz." We'll leave Korzybski out of this one
(I suspect Heinlein borrowed the name from A. Korzybski, a sematicist of
some renown back in the 1930s.) To me the interesting nodes involve the
words "Silard" "lenz" "beryllium," "uranium" and "bomb." So let's agree
that here is a story that includes a gestalt of the words "Silard, lenz,
beryllium, uranium and bomb."
But you can't use that particular "gestalt" when talking about the
probability that a coincidence like this would occur, because you never
would have predicted that precise gestalt in advance even if you were
specifically looking for stories that anticipated aspects of the Manhatten
project.
Where on earth did *that* gestalt rule come from??? ;-)
It would make more sense to look at the probability of a story that
includes *any* combination of words that somehow anticipate aspects of
the Manhatten project. Let's say there were about 10^10 possible such
gestalts we could come up with, and if you scanned trillions of parallel
universes you'd see the proportion of universes where a story echoed at
least one such gestalt was fairly high--1 in 15, say.
This means that in 1 in 15 universes, there will be a person like you who
notices this anticipation and, if he uses your method of only estimating
the probability of that *particular* gestalt, will say "there's only a 1
in 10^9 probability that something like this could have happened by
chance!" Obviously something is wrong with any logic that leads you to see
a 1 in 10^9 probability coincidence happening in 1 in 15 possible
universes, and in this hypothetical example it's clear the problem is that
these parallel coincidence-spotters are using too narrow a notion of
"something like this", one which is too much biased by hindsight knowledge
of what actually happened in their universe, rather than something they
plausibly might have specifically thought to look for before they actually
knew about the existence of such a story.
Sounds like you're invoking rules of causation here--post hoc rather than
ad hoc, hindsight bias, etc. Certainly I am not suggesting Heinlein's
story caused Szilard to be hired (interesting thought, though!) And
unless I want to invoke Cramer's transactional approach, I would not
really want to think that the Manhattan Project caused Heinlein to write
his story. That would require reverse causation, and we know that doesn't
happen. This is very simple: we have instances in which Heinlein includes
key words (definable as being essential to the story---without them,
different story) that form a gestalt of. . .well, key words. These words
are equivalent to those describing the Manhattan Project and not many
other things. To show that there are not many other things these key word
gestalts describe, one can wait a year and use Google Print to call up all
the books and stories associated with these key words. Then we will have
a probability to work with. Since the gestalts are separated by four
years (or thereabouts) then we shouldn't have to invoke causation.
How is this potentially valuable? Suppose we use Google Print again and
find all the instances of key word gestalts in sci fi matching key word
gestalts in scientific non-fiction---at a later date. What if we found
that there seems to be a four-year gap between the two--no more, no
less. That piece of information may be valuable later on down the road in
trying to piece the puzzle together.
But just to say that we shouldn't investigate it because it's all a
coincidence, or that the hypothesis was improperly framed, or that it
violates some of Hill's Rules of Causation--- is just reinforcing the
notion that math and logic are not up to the task of investigating some
things in the real world.
RM