--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "curtisdeltablues" <curtisdeltablues@...> wrote: > > > It is more than just that it COULD have been coincidence. No causality was > proven. It was just asserted. What they attempted to prove with statistical > maneuvering is simultaneity. But they claim much more because people get > confused about the difference between the two. > > > > > The interesting thing is how hard non-TMers have worked > > to attempt to debunk the various studies that have been > > done on the positive effects of the big World Peace > > Assemblies. One might almost wonder if *they* were the > > ones wrestling with cognitive dissonance. > > It takes nothing to "debunk" this type of claim. The claimed benefit is too > vague, so of course some "better" things happened during any period of time. > It is a classic case of preying on our lack of intuition dealing with > statistical matters.
I am generally in accord with what you say and your perspective. We have shared thoughts before on the trap of seeing causality from correlation. And seeing correlations in random events. (An interesting exercise is to generate series of random numbers, plot them out and repeated recalc them -- and see the totally random series assume all sorts of (unreal) patterns and trends inside ones head. However, primary underlying drivers of historical trends and dynamics (a la rise and fall of civilizations and cultures), world and macro economic events are nebulous at best. No particular model works well on its own. Together, weaving together a number of models of how things work, may (or may not) bear some fruit. And all is next to impossible to establish within hard, cold statistical methods. (And such methods are hardly perfect, the field of econometrics is the history of finding serious flaws in past methods and fixing them -- with no assurance that the current methods don't themselves have significant biases left within them.) And as we have discussed, there are many avenues by which to grok things. Art, film literature, poetry, music for example. Alternative avenues of understanding that are generally outside of hard statistical analysis. However, insights from such can lead to effective prediction at times (which generally is not statistically established -- but when 2-3 or more such predictions work within ones life using such methods, it may be coincidence -- but it does make one a bit more sensitive to the possibility that there may be something to it.) When the Berlin Wall / Eastern Europe fell, it was a "holy shit" moment for me. As in the wonder of it. My past biases surely influenced my reaction that "maybe the old man was right, I never expected to see the iron curtain fall in my lifetime, and here it is.") Hardly science, but still, interesting speculation. What was slightly more scientific for me was the predictions that (which fell from my head at the time) -- extrapolating this forward (something along the lines of "end of cold economy, refocusing on those wasted resources to things of economic and social value, increasing coherence (assuming coherence had anything to do with the fall of the Iron Curtain) would leave to a booming stock market in the 90's." I casually made such a prediction in 89 or so, amongst peers, and forgot about it. 8 or so years later, one of these colleagues reminded me of the prediction -- and he said he was all ears since the thought had turned out to be right (again all possibly coincidentally). However, the test of any theory is can it be used to make accurate predictions. making a few such accurate predictions does not establish the model as valid -- but it is still in the running -- in contrast to a series of false predictions which would tend to discredit the model. Most of what we decide to do in our lives is based on very imperfect models of causality and prediction. Yet, we take stabs in the dark and muddle forward. Taking MMY's later and last predictions / visions of future coherence, and the bumpy transitional ride towards it: things are unfolding, in my mind, along the lines that I generally would have expected from his model and predictions. I see a path of transition that is unfolding in "predictable ways" -- for me and points to possible directions of future change. And to me these are as valid as many other non-established (statistically) stakes in the ground that I make everyday about life and world events. YMMV
