Re: Another tedious hypothetical
rmiller wrote: At 11:08 PM 6/8/2005, Jesse Mazer wrote: (snip) You should instead calculate the probability that a story would contain *any* combination of meaningful words associated with the Manhattan project. This is exactly analogous to the fact that in my example, you should have been calculating the probability that *any* combination of words from the list of 100 would appear in a book title, not the probability that the particular word combination sun, also, and rises would appear. RM: Are you suggesting that a fair analysis would be to wait until Google Print has the requisite number of books available, download the text, then sic Mathematica onto them to look for word associations linked with a target? What limits would you place on this (if any?) Or would this be a useless (though certainly do-able) exercise? I'm saying that you have to select the possible targets before you actually go mining the data of old stories to see what's there (or at least you have to try to imagine you didn't know what was there when selecting the targets). If your choice of targets is explicitly based on what you find in the data you will get bad probability estimates, for reasons I've already explained (you haven't really responded to these arguments in any substantive way--for example, do you agree or disagree that basing the choice of target on knowledge of the data tends to lead to situations where, even if the correlations are pure coincidence, 1 out of x parallel versions of you would claim to see a 'hit' with a significance of 1 out of y, where y x?) . . . Would it be fair to test for ESP. . . We're not testing for ESP--only out-of-causal-order gestalts in popular literature that are associated with similar gestalts in literature (or national) events taking place at some future time. Yes, I was using ESP as an umbrella term for any mysterious foreknowledge that can't be explained in terms of currently-known types of information channels. Substitute foreknowledge not explainable in terms of known science for ESP in that sentence (and any other sentence where I talk about 'ESP') if you like. Or it might be explained by some of the more offbeat analytical procedures---say, involving exponential or Poisson probabilities as applied to delayed choice events. I know what delayed choice means in the context of QM, but what do you mean by applying exponential or Poisson probabilities to delayed choice? According to our current version of QM, it is possible to prove that delayed choice experiments cannot be used to send information backwards in time--are you suggesting a modification of QM, and if so, how exactly are exponential or Poisson probabilities involved? Again, my concern is that scientists are too willing to prejudge something before diving into it. OK, but this is a tangent that has nothing to do with the issue I raised in my posts about the wrongness of selecting the target (whose probability of guessing you want to calculate) using hindsight knowledge of what was actually guessed. As a former fed, I would wholeheartedly disagree. There is a grand tradition of avoiding analysis by whatever means are available, including hindsight knowledge invalidating the correlation. In other words, you shouldn't ever mine for data. Thankfully, that admonition is routinely ignored by many biostatisticians. I'm not saying you should never mine the data, I'm just saying if you want to do an actual calculation of the probability that a correlation would happen by coincidence, you can't use this type of hindsight knowledge in selecting the target whose probability-of-happening-by-coincidence you want to calculate. I've given several examples of how this leads to badly wrong answers, and again, you haven't really addressed those examples. If you don't want to discuss this specific issue then say so--I am not really interested in discussing the larger issue of what the correct way to calculate the probability of the Heinlein coincidences would be, I only wanted to talk about this specific way in which *your* method is obviously wrong. Thank you. (Finally!!!) Whew! That sentence has validated the entire horrid exercise. May I quote you??? Is this supposed to be validating your claim that scientists prejudge issues? Note that I'm not a scientist, and I'm also not prejudging things, I'm just saying I'd rather not discuss this right now, just because I personally am not that interested in it, and also because it's a distraction from the topic that I originally brought up. If I were to use your post as a jumping-off point to talk about some totally unrelated issue like the mechanics of cumulus cloud formation, and you were not that interested in talking about this issue and wanted to get back to the topics you were originally talking about, could I use that to validate my view that you are guilty of prejudging the
Re: Another tedious hypothetical
rmiller wrote:
At 05:22 PM 6/8/2005, Jesse Mazer wrote:
rmiller wrote:
At 02:45 PM 6/7/2005, Jesse Mazer wrote:
(snip)
Of course in this example Feynman did not anticipate in advance what
licence plate he'd see, but the kind of hindsight bias you are
engaging in can be shown with another example. Suppose you pick 100
random words out of a dictionary, and then notice that the list contains
the words sun, also, and rises...as it so happens, that particular
3-word gestalt is also part of the title of a famous book, the sun
also rises by Hemingway. Is this evidence that Hemingway was able to
anticipate the results of your word-selection through ESP? Would it be
fair to test for ESP by calculating the probability that someone would
title a book with the exact 3-word gestalt sun, also, rises? No,
because this would be tailoring the choice of gestalt to Hemingway's
book in order to make it seem more unlikely, in fact there are 970,200
possible 3-word gestalts you could pick out of a list of 100 possible
words, so the probability that a book published earlier would contain
*any* of these gestalts is a lot higher than the probability it would
contain the precise gestalt sun, also, rises. Selecting a precise
target gestalt on the basis of the fact that you already know there's a
book/story containing that gestalt is an example of hindsight bias--in
the Heinlein example, you wouldn't have chosen the precise gestalt of
Szilard/lens/beryllium/uranium/bomb from a long list of words associated
with the Manhattan Project if you didn't already know about Heinlein's
story.
RM wrote:
In two words: Conclusions first.
Can you really offer no scientific procedure to evaluate Heinlein's
story?
At the cookie jar level, can you at least grudgingly admit that the word
Szilard sure looks like Silard? Sounds like it too. Or is that a
coincidence as well? What are the odds. Should be calculable--how many
stories written in 1939 include the names of Los Alamos scientists in
conjunction with the words bomb , uranium. . .
You're shaking your head. This, I assume is already a done deal, for
you.
And that, in my view, is the heart of the problem. Rather than swallow
hard and look at this in a non-biased fashion, you seem to be glued to
the proposition that (1) it's intractable or (2) it's not worth analyzing
because the answer is obvious.
I think you misunderstood what I was arguing in my previous posts. If you
look them over again, you'll see that I wasn't making a broad statement
about the impossibility of estimating the probability that this event
would have happened by chance, I was making a specific criticism of *your*
method of doing so, where you estimate the probability of the particular
gestalt of Szilard/lens/beryllium/uranium/bomb, rather than trying to
estimate the probability that a story would anticipate *any* possible
gestalt associated with the Manhattan Project. By doing this, you are
incorporating hindsight knowledge of Heinlein's story into your choice of
the target whose probability you want to estimate, and in general this
will always lead to estimates of the significance of a hit which are
much too high. If you instead asked someone with no knowledge of of
Heinlein's story to come up with a list of as many possible words
associated with the Manhattan Project that he could think of, then
estimated the probability that a story would anticipate *any* combination
of words on the list, then your method would not be vulnerable to this
criticism (it might be flawed for other reasons, but I didn't address any
of these other reasons in my previous posts).
Good starting premise. But words have meaning, and while the sun also
rises may be interpreted to presage the bomb, it in fact is about
bullfighting. No nukes there.
My example had nothing to do with nukes, it was just about the fact that
Hemingway's book title anticipated three of the words on my random list of
100 words.
Heinlein's story is clearly about energy being derived from uranium--*and*
has the name Silard. These can not be compared with random number
associations, simply because these words involve more information. To use
a crude example, in the science community the name Szilard conjures up
one prime association.
This is a complete non sequitur--the fact that the words have meaning has
nothing to do with calculating the probability that someone like Heinlein
would guess them by chance (similarly, in my example it wouldn't really make
a difference if the 100 words were part of a meaningful poem rather than
being selected at random). The point of the analogy is just that there are
lots of other words associated with the Manhattan Project ('Oppenheimer',
'mushroom', 'fat man', etc.), words which of course all have meaning too,
and that calculating the probability of the *particular* words
Szilard/lens/uranium/etc. appearing in a story is not legitimate because
that
Re: Another tedious hypothetical
At 11:08 PM 6/8/2005, Jesse Mazer wrote: (snip) You should instead calculate the probability that a story would contain *any* combination of meaningful words associated with the Manhattan project. This is exactly analogous to the fact that in my example, you should have been calculating the probability that *any* combination of words from the list of 100 would appear in a book title, not the probability that the particular word combination sun, also, and rises would appear. RM: Are you suggesting that a fair analysis would be to wait until Google Print has the requisite number of books available, download the text, then sic Mathematica onto them to look for word associations linked with a target? What limits would you place on this (if any?) Or would this be a useless (though certainly do-able) exercise? (snip) . . . Would it be fair to test for ESP. . . We're not testing for ESP--only out-of-causal-order gestalts in popular literature that are associated with similar gestalts in literature (or national) events taking place at some future time. There might be a fine--though humdrum and unpredictable---explanation for this sort of business. Or it might be explained by some of the more offbeat analytical procedures---say, involving exponential or Poisson probabilities as applied to delayed choice events. Who knows? While I wouldn't rule it out, I personally don't think the eventual answer--if there is one---will involve anything as humdrum as ESP. And if this sort of thing is to be expected in the course of publishing events, then there should be a mathematical formula that can predict it, given the input variables (which is why I think exponential or Poisson might be involved.) Again, my concern is that scientists are too willing to prejudge something before diving into it. OK, but this is a tangent that has nothing to do with the issue I raised in my posts about the wrongness of selecting the target (whose probability of guessing you want to calculate) using hindsight knowledge of what was actually guessed. As a former fed, I would wholeheartedly disagree. There is a grand tradition of avoiding analysis by whatever means are available, including hindsight knowledge invalidating the correlation. In other words, you shouldn't ever mine for data. Thankfully, that admonition is routinely ignored by many biostatisticians. If you don't want to discuss this specific issue then say so--I am not really interested in discussing the larger issue of what the correct way to calculate the probability of the Heinlein coincidences would be, I only wanted to talk about this specific way in which *your* method is obviously wrong. Thank you. (Finally!!!) Whew! That sentence has validated the entire horrid exercise. May I quote you??? Like I said before, any method that could be invented by someone who didn't know in advance about Heinlein's story would avoid this particular mistake. . . . . .another money quote. . . *although it might suffer from other flaws*. This one too!!! Regards and Thanks Again! Rich M.
Re: Another tedious hypothetical
rmiller wrote: 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 comes from the idea that if you are going to claim a hit for ESP or whatever that has a significance level of 1 in 10^9, then it should be true that *if* ESP didn't exist and the hit was a pure coincidence, then no more than 1 in 10^9 versions of you in different possible universes should be claiming to have seen a hit with that level of significance--that seems to be inherent in the meaning of significance level, no? If 1 out of 15 parallel versions of you would end up claiming to see a hit with a significance level of 1 in 10^9, *even if there was no ESP and these hits were pure coincidence*, then obviously something is wrong with the reasoning that these various versions of you are using. Do you disagree? I wrote: 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. you responded: 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. You are misunderstanding the meaning of hindsight bias, it's not about the prediction causing the event being predicted or vice versa, it's about *you* making a retroactive calculation of the probability of a particular successful prediction which is illegitimate because you incorporate knowledge of what already happened into your choice of the target whose probability of predicting you want to calculate. This is illustrated by an anecdote involving Richard Feynman which is quoted at http://www.numeraire.com/value_wizard/probable.htm : What came to Feynman by common sense were often brilliant
Re: Another tedious hypothetical
At 02:45 PM 6/7/2005, Jesse Mazer wrote: (snip) Of course in this example Feynman did not anticipate in advance what licence plate he'd see, but the kind of hindsight bias you are engaging in can be shown with another example. Suppose you pick 100 random words out of a dictionary, and then notice that the list contains the words sun, also, and rises...as it so happens, that particular 3-word gestalt is also part of the title of a famous book, the sun also rises by Hemingway. Is this evidence that Hemingway was able to anticipate the results of your word-selection through ESP? Would it be fair to test for ESP by calculating the probability that someone would title a book with the exact 3-word gestalt sun, also, rises? No, because this would be tailoring the choice of gestalt to Hemingway's book in order to make it seem more unlikely, in fact there are 970,200 possible 3-word gestalts you could pick out of a list of 100 possible words, so the probability that a book published earlier would contain *any* of these gestalts is a lot higher than the probability it would contain the precise gestalt sun, also, rises. Selecting a precise target gestalt on the basis of the fact that you already know there's a book/story containing that gestalt is an example of hindsight bias--in the Heinlein example, you wouldn't have chosen the precise gestalt of Szilard/lens/beryllium/uranium/bomb from a long list of words associated with the Manhattan Project if you didn't already know about Heinlein's story. RM wrote: In two words: Conclusions first. Can you really offer no scientific procedure to evaluate Heinlein's story? At the cookie jar level, can you at least grudgingly admit that the word Szilard sure looks like Silard? Sounds like it too. Or is that a coincidence as well? What are the odds. Should be calculable--how many stories written in 1939 include the names of Los Alamos scientists in conjunction with the words bomb , uranium. . . You're shaking your head. This, I assume is already a done deal, for you. And that, in my view, is the heart of the problem. Rather than swallow hard and look at this in a non-biased fashion, you seem to be glued to the proposition that (1) it's intractable or (2) it's not worth analyzing because the answer is obvious. If your answer is (1), then fine. Let others worry about it. But if your answer is (2), then congratulations---you've likely committed a Type II error. In all of your posts, you seem to present reasons why the Heinlein story should not be investigated because (I'm paraphrasing, of course) it's obviously not worthy of investigation. You exclude ALL the evidence---even the Bonferroni doesn't do that. Logically, if you exclude all the evidence, then the probability that you might miss something go to. . .1. One hundred percent. When one chooses to use, say Spearman Correlation Coefficients to evaluate multiple pairs, the usual protocol involves using the Bonferroni correction--in which the alpha (often at 0.05) is divided by some multiple of the number of pairs evaluated--usually simply the number of pairs. A thousand pairs? then, the alpha should be divided by a thousand and the resultant p value accepted as similar to a single p value of 0.05. Problem is, this sort of trick will cost you statistical power. You may not decide something is significant when it is not, but you may also throw out a value that truly is important. As the type I error risk goes down, the Type II error risk goes up. (Reducing alpha increases beta (the probability of making a Type II error.) There are reputable statisticians who suggest not using the Bonferroni at all. In my work, I evaluate cancer rates against radioisotopes in nuclear fallout---but I require a very high Z score for significance. I've yet to see a good protocol defined here to evaluate the Heinlein story, most prefer to fall back onto the soft couch of bias and prejudgment. But in doing so, your beta goes out the roof--and you guarantee yourself that you'll never recognize *anything* as significant. It would seem that it would be far easier and more scientifically sound to just admit that you are aware of no tools that can properly evaluate it. PS: Note I haven't mentioned anything about proof or causation---merely the ability to apply the scientific method--properly free of bias---to a set of circumstances. So far (as with the Thompkins quote)--it looks like conclusions first, justification later. Hope your drug company doesn't use the same protocol. Because *that* wouldn't be right, would it?;-) RM
Re: Another tedious hypothetical
I would say 0: 0. All a Coincidence (I don't see *big* coincidences) and then 5. I'm agnostic about what you talk about. I love the book by Suzanne Blackmore In search of the light because it shows parapsychology can be done seriously, but then the evidence are until today rather negative. Drinking coffee in the morning is sufficiently miraculous for me now. With comp, evidence of precognition could be evidence for the very low-levelness of the substitution level. Le 05-juin-05, à 19:34, rmiller a écrit : All, Another hypothetical. In 1939, let's say, a writer comes up with a sci-fi story, which is published the next year. It involves (let's say) a uranium bomb and a beryllium target in the Arizona desert that might blow up and cause problems for everyone. His main character is a fellow he decides to name Silard. Two other characters he names Korzybski and Lenz. Two cities are named in the story: Manhattan and Chicago. Along about the same time, in 1939 an out-of-work scientist named Leo Szilard is crossing a street in London (no, he doesn't know the sci fi writer.) Four years later Leo Szilard will be working with a guy named George Kistiakowski---whose job it is to fashion a lens configuration for the explosives surrounding a nuclear core for the first atomic bomb---code named, the Manhattan Project. Some of the other scientists, Enrico Fermi, for example, are from Chicago (where the first man-made nuclear pile was constructed---under the ampitheater.) Now, pick one: 1. All a Big Coincidence Proving Nothing (ABCPN) 2. The writer obviously was privy to state secrets and should have been arrested. 3. Suggests precognition of a very strange and weird sort. 4. Might fit a QM many worlds model and should be investigated further. 5. I have no clue how to even address something like this. Any takers? RM http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
RE: Another tedious hypothetical
It sounds like an incredible coincidence, but you also have to take into account all the *other* stories which did not turn out to be anywhere near the truth. A long enough sequence of random data will always produce apparently non-random results. In fact, this seems counterintuitive to most people. One way of picking fraudulent accounting practices is to look at the strings of numbers in question looking for the relative absence of, for example, runs of the same digit, or runs of consecutive digits. Only the best crooked accountants seem to know that avoiding such strings because they don't look random enough is a giveaway. --Stathis Papaioannou R. Miller wrote: Now, pick one: 1. All a Big Coincidence Proving Nothing (ABCPN) 2. The writer obviously was privy to state secrets and should have been arrested. 3. Suggests precognition of a very strange and weird sort. 4. Might fit a QM many worlds model and should be investigated further. 5. I have no clue how to even address something like this. Any takers? LC: I'll go for 1, all a big coincidence. Firstly, it should be taken as the default hypothesis. Second, in my opinion no reliable evidence has ever surfaced that points to precognition, or points to a science theory that is an elaboration of QM/GR. In fact, numerous claims of something new are regularly debunked by skeptics, and have picked up the name (rightly, in my opinion) of pseudo-science. RM: Given a set of events that are impossible to reproduce (how can the writer re-create the basis for his story a second time?) we can only examine them after the fact in terms of probabilities. Even if we didn't go to a phonebook and look up the relative number of Silards or Lenzes vs the more common names, it's fairly obvious that the probabilities of this being a chance occurrence are on the order of one in tens of millions. Yet we write this kind of thing off as coincidence. The example I gave, (of course) is a real story titled Blowups Happen written by a real sci fi author--Robert Heinlein. Heinlein was asked about the coincidence, and he said he had no idea where he got the names or the idea. The story itself was *was* written in 1939---many years before the Manhattan District Project was even considered by anyone--and before Szilard began work on nukes and before Kistiakowski began work on his lenses. Most who have written about this focus on the fact that the story is about a uranium bomb at a site in the Arizona desert. But when one gets into the minutiae is where it gets truly weird. Neither Heinlein in 1939-- nor most journalists who wrote about the coincidences since then--- were aware of the explosive lens issue, nor were they aware that most fission nukes have beryllium neutron reflectors. I'll suspect Heinlein chose the name Korzybski from a semi-famous semanticist from the 1920s and 30s named Alfred Korzybski. But to me, the other coincidences are just too weird to ignore. LC writes: In world war II, the FBI did question one man who published a story involving atomic theory or atomic bombs that had some eerie similarities to what was top secret. But they determined that it was just coincidence. I'd be lying if I claimed to be unaffected by that report. RM replies: That would be the Clive Cartmill story Deadline which appeared in a 1944 issue of Astounding magazine. Actually, atomic bombs were accepted as a possibility since HG Wells' 1914 story The World Set Free. INMO, the Cartmill story *is* coincidence. The Heinlein story is *truly* weird. RM _ Sell your car for $9 on carpoint.com.au http://www.carpoint.com.au/sellyourcar
Re: Another tedious hypothetical
On Jun 5, 2005, at 11:14 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:I would say 0: 0. All a Coincidence (I don't see *big* coincidences) and then 5.I'm agnostic about what you talk about. I love the book by Suzanne Blackmore "In search of the light" because it shows parapsychology can be done seriously, but then the evidence are until today rather negative. "Drinking coffee in the morning" is sufficiently miraculous for me now. With comp, evidence of precognition could be evidence for the very low-levelness of the substitution level.I'm with Bruno (both on option "0" and on coffee).You might like to read Richard Dawkins's book "Unweaving the Rainbow", especially the chapter "Unweaving the Uncanny". It contains a thorough demolishing of the human intuition to put importance on seeming coincidences such as your Heinlein story. You are very willing to say "Even if we didn't go to a phonebook and look up the relative number of "Silards" or "Lenzes" vs the more common names, it's fairly obvious that the probabilities of this being a chance occurrence are on the order of one in tens of millions." It's precisely this "obviousness", and the number (tens of millions) that you are failing to account for in any way.You also haven't been too precise about the population of events that you would also have accepted to be a coincidence. You take the name "Lenz" to be significant because the bomb involved a lens -- so you would also presumably have accepted the names "Baum" (bomb), Beryl, Berle, ". "Silard" and "Szilard" are very similar, but I am willing to bet that "Schiller" or "Stiller" or "Sellars" would also have tripped your coincidenceometer. You mention "Korzybski" presumably because you see a resemblance to "Kistiakowski"; you probably would have also accepted Kieslowski, Kowaleski, Kowalowski, Krzyzanowski, Kuczynski, or indeed any other Polish surname. You would probably not have accepted "Franklin" - but then you might have been able to find some other aspect of the bomb project that involved a Frank, or a Lynn, or something taking place in Frankfurt.. and so on.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.
Re: Another tedious hypothetical
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. my second comment. . .if it's such a trivial matter, then perhaps you can find and produce another publication that includes the gestalt found in Heinlein's story. Anything before 1945 that is. You may want to go to Google Print---that should be helpful. RM
Re: Another tedious hypothetical
Jesse has it right on here, and one can go even further in this vein. You are impressed by the relationship between one particular story and one particular event - but you hand-picked both the story and the event for discussion here because of their superficial similarities. You challenged me to find another example of a story with the same resemblances that the Heinlein story has to the atomic bomb project. But resemblances between any written story and any similar event that happens after the story's publication would be in the same class.I'm not saying that the resemblances between the story and the bomb are trivial - they do make an impression. It also makes an impression when someone dreams of a relative dying and the next day they receive news that that relative did in fact die that night; or when you're in a foreign city and you look up the number of the taxi company and it turns out to be your home phone number, or when exactly 100 years separate (1) the election to Congress (2) the election to the presidency (3) the birth of the assassins of and (4) the birth of the successors of John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln.These coincidences all make an impression on one. But nothing special needs to be invoked to explain the occurrence of these events -- what needs to be explained is the facet of human psychology that makes people think something strange is going on when in fact nothing is. Many people have taken stabs at it, and evolutionary explanations seem to work well -- seriously, you should get the Dawkins book and read the chapter to see where we're coming from; Carl Sagan also addressed this issue very well.--Also, you still have not explained how you get 1 in 10e-9.
Re: Another tedious hypothetical
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
Re: Another tedious hypothetical
At 06:56 PM 6/6/2005, you wrote: Jesse has it right on here, and one can go even further in this vein. You are impressed by the relationship between one particular story and one particular event - but you hand-picked both the story and the event for discussion here because of their superficial similarities. You challenged me to find another example of a story with the same resemblances that the Heinlein story has to the atomic bomb project. But resemblances between any written story and any similar event that happens after the story's publication would be in the same class. I'm not saying that Heinlein was plugged into anything particular. As a sociologist, my interest is the inability of some branches of science to address many common-sense events. Any scientist worth his degree can conjure up logic in order to drop a complicated issue and move on to something else: improperly framed question, no prior data, no model, post hoc cherry-picking, etc and etc. I once had a phone chat with Ray Hyams about this---his response was telling---basically skeptics don't investigate---they debunk. That isn't the scientific method; that's a belief system. That, and economical considerations, of course, is why it took 10 years before medicine figured out the importance of helicobacter pylori. My own working definition of a science skeptic is the last guy on the cul-de-sac who hasn't been told (by everyone else) how to find his water lines using two clotheshangers. The reason of course, is that everyone knows it wouldn't work for him anyway. ;-) I'm not saying that the resemblances between the story and the bomb are trivial - they do make an impression. It also makes an impression when someone dreams of a relative dying and the next day they receive news that that relative did in fact die that night; or when you're in a foreign city and you look up the number of the taxi company and it turns out to be your home phone number, or when exactly 100 years separate (1) the election to Congress (2) the election to the presidency (3) the birth of the assassins of and (4) the birth of the successors of John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln. If the Heinlein story failed to impress, then may I ask what went missing in it that--had it been there--would have suggested further study? Twenty key words and phrases including Oppenheimer, Trinity plutonium Neddermeyer mushroom cloud Teller Light and shake? Or would that again be just classified as a rather unusual coincidence? I hear a lot of qualifiers (such as the one below) but nothing substantial regarding your criteria. It seems all very vague--except of course, for the conclusion. If you have a criteria or model for evaluating some of these events (such as Heinleins example) I'd like to hear it. Then, as good scientists, we can begin to evaluate how appropriate it may be for the examination of these unusual events. Until we have that protocol defined, I'm sorry, you're just expressing a belief (that nothing that can't be explained by a model is exceptional or even should be evaluated.) These coincidences all make an impression on one. But nothing special needs to be invoked to explain the occurrence of these events -- what needs to be explained is the facet of human psychology that makes people think something strange is going on when in fact nothing is. Yet, without knowing the facts you immediately assume the facts when in fact nothing is. It's a common position taken by the lazy scientist---and it doesn't have to do with strange things, either. It's why the EPA never bothered to determine the density of the WTC surge cloud. Nothing to worry about, because, well, *in fact* there is nothing to worry about. The citizens of New York *do* appreciate that position. (hey, Pete, you're a fed---why haven't they come up with the density?) Many people have taken stabs at it, and evolutionary explanations seem to work well -- seriously, you should get the Dawkins book and read the chapter to see where we're coming from; Carl Sagan also addressed this issue very well. And of course, I encourage you to consider coming up with an appropriate protocol that doesn't include prejudging the data, or assuming facts not in evidence---and tell us what the density of that surge cloud was in milligrams per cubic meter. Is that in a book somewhere also? ;-) --Also, you still have not explained how you get 1 in 10e-9. I used it as an example of a p value that is dreadfully easy to obtain when applying standard probabilities to any of these events. My concern is that for many scientists, 1x10^-9, though ridiculously small---is, for some things, still not small enough. Which is why scientists have willfully ceded important areas of research to the likes of the Midnight Examiner, the Star, The Washington Times and Fox News. Cheers, RM Pete, if you need some numbers to call at the EPA's RTP facility, I'll be glad to give em to you.
Re: Another tedious hypothetical
Pete Carlton wrote: Jesse has it right on here, and one can go even further in this vein. You are impressed by the relationship between one particular story and one particular event - but you hand-picked both the story and the event for discussion here because of their superficial similarities. You challenged me to find another example of a story with the same resemblances that the Heinlein story has to the atomic bomb project. But resemblances between any written story and any similar event that happens after the story's publication would be in the same class. I'm not saying that the resemblances between the story and the bomb are trivial - they do make an impression. It also makes an impression when someone dreams of a relative dying and the next day they receive news that that relative did in fact die that night; or when you're in a foreign city and you look up the number of the taxi company and it turns out to be your home phone number, or when exactly 100 years separate (1) the election to Congress (2) the election to the presidency (3) the birth of the assassins of and (4) the birth of the successors of John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln. You also need to consider what in the academic world is called publication bias. Richard Feynman once told a story about a sudden premonition he had that his grandmother had died. Uncannily, the next moment the phone rang - and it was his grandmother, alive and well. For every case you hear about where a premonition (or whatever) miraculously comes true, there are the hundreds of cases where it doesn't come true, which you don't hear about because they're not noteworthy. Is it just a coincidence that just about everyone on this list is a cynical skeptic? --Stathis Papaioannou _ SEEK: Over 80,000 jobs across all industries at Australia's #1 job site. http://ninemsn.seek.com.au?hotmail
Another Tedious Hypothetical
All, Another hypothetical. In 1939, let's say, a writer comes up with a sci-fi story, which is published the next year. It involves (let's say) a uranium bomb and a beryllium target in the Arizona desert that might blow up and cause problems for everyone. His main character is a fellow he decides to name Silard. Two other characters he names Korzybski and Lenz. Two cities are named in the story: Manhattan and Chicago. Along about the same time, in 1939 an out-of-work scientist named Leo Szilard is crossing a street in London (no, he doesn't know the sci fi writer.) Four years later Leo Szilard will be working with a guy named George Kistiakowski---whose job it is to fashion a lens configuration for the explosives surrounding a nuclear core for the first atomic bomb---code named, the Manhattan Project. Some of the other scientists, Enrico Fermi, for example, are from Chicago (where the first man-made nuclear pile was constructed---under the ampitheater.) Now, pick one: 1. All a Big Coincidence Proving Nothing (ABCPN) 2. The writer obviously was privy to state secrets and should have been arrested. 3. Suggests precognition of a very strange and weird sort. 4. Might fit a QM many worlds model and should be investigated further. 5. I have no clue how to even address something like this. Any takers? RM
Another tedious hypothetical
All, Another hypothetical. In 1939, let's say, a writer comes up with a sci-fi story, which is published the next year. It involves (let's say) a uranium bomb and a beryllium target in the Arizona desert that might blow up and cause problems for everyone. His main character is a fellow he decides to name Silard. Two other characters he names Korzybski and Lenz. Two cities are named in the story: Manhattan and Chicago. Along about the same time, in 1939 an out-of-work scientist named Leo Szilard is crossing a street in London (no, he doesn't know the sci fi writer.) Four years later Leo Szilard will be working with a guy named George Kistiakowski---whose job it is to fashion a lens configuration for the explosives surrounding a nuclear core for the first atomic bomb---code named, the Manhattan Project. Some of the other scientists, Enrico Fermi, for example, are from Chicago (where the first man-made nuclear pile was constructed---under the ampitheater.) Now, pick one: 1. All a Big Coincidence Proving Nothing (ABCPN) 2. The writer obviously was privy to state secrets and should have been arrested. 3. Suggests precognition of a very strange and weird sort. 4. Might fit a QM many worlds model and should be investigated further. 5. I have no clue how to even address something like this. Any takers? RM
Re: Another Tedious Hypothetical
At 12:31 PM 6/5/2005, rmiller wrote: A correction---the first nuclear test, was named, of course, Trinity, not The Manhattan Project. And the core of the device, which Oppenheimer called the gadget was about the size of a grapefruit. RM
RE: Another tedious hypothetical
Rich writes Another hypothetical. In 1939, let's say, a writer comes up with a sci-fi story, which is published the next year. It involves (let's say) a uranium bomb and a beryllium target in the Arizona desert that might blow up and cause problems for everyone. His main character is a fellow he decides to name Silard. Two other characters he names Korzybski and Lenz. Two cities are named in the story: Manhattan and Chicago. Along about the same time, in 1939 an out-of-work scientist named Leo Szilard is crossing a street in London (no, he doesn't know the sci fi writer.) Four years later Leo Szilard will be working with a guy named George Kistiakowski---whose job it is to fashion a lens configuration for the explosives surrounding a nuclear core for the first atomic bomb---code named, the Manhattan Project. Some of the other scientists, Enrico Fermi, for example, are from Chicago (where the first man-made nuclear pile was constructed---under the amphitheater.) (A correction---the first nuclear test, was named, of course, Trinity, not The Manhattan Project. And the core of the device, which Oppenheimer called the gadget was about the size of a grapefruit. -RM) Now, pick one: 1. All a Big Coincidence Proving Nothing (ABCPN) 2. The writer obviously was privy to state secrets and should have been arrested. 3. Suggests precognition of a very strange and weird sort. 4. Might fit a QM many worlds model and should be investigated further. 5. I have no clue how to even address something like this. Any takers? I'll go for 1, all a big coincidence. Firstly, it should be taken as the default hypothesis. Second, in my opinion no reliable evidence has ever surfaced that points to precognition, or points to a science theory that is an elaboration of QM/GR. In fact, numerous claims of something new are regularly debunked by skeptics, and have picked up the name (rightly, in my opinion) of pseudo-science. In world war II, the FBI did question one man who published a story involving atomic theory or atomic bombs that had some eerie similarities to what was top secret. But they determined that it was just coincidence. I'd be lying if I claimed to be unaffected by that report. Lee
RE: Another Tedious Hypothetical
In order: 2,1,5,3,4. --Stathis Papaioannou All, Another hypothetical. In 1939, let's say, a writer comes up with a sci-fi story, which is published the next year. It involves (let's say) a uranium bomb and a beryllium target in the Arizona desert that might blow up and cause problems for everyone. His main character is a fellow he decides to name Silard. Two other characters he names Korzybski and Lenz. Two cities are named in the story: Manhattan and Chicago. Along about the same time, in 1939 an out-of-work scientist named Leo Szilard is crossing a street in London (no, he doesn't know the sci fi writer.) Four years later Leo Szilard will be working with a guy named George Kistiakowski---whose job it is to fashion a lens configuration for the explosives surrounding a nuclear core for the first atomic bomb---code named, the Manhattan Project. Some of the other scientists, Enrico Fermi, for example, are from Chicago (where the first man-made nuclear pile was constructed---under the ampitheater.) Now, pick one: 1. All a Big Coincidence Proving Nothing (ABCPN) 2. The writer obviously was privy to state secrets and should have been arrested. 3. Suggests precognition of a very strange and weird sort. 4. Might fit a QM many worlds model and should be investigated further. 5. I have no clue how to even address something like this. Any takers? RM _ REALESTATE: biggest buy/rent/share listings http://ninemsn.realestate.com.au
RE: Another Tedious Hypothetical
At 09:01 PM 6/5/2005, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: In order: 2,1,5,3,4. --Stathis Papaioannou Thanks to Lee and Stathis-- Anyone else? R.
RE: Another tedious hypothetical
At 03:40 PM 6/5/2005, you wrote: RM writes (snip) Now, pick one: 1. All a Big Coincidence Proving Nothing (ABCPN) 2. The writer obviously was privy to state secrets and should have been arrested. 3. Suggests precognition of a very strange and weird sort. 4. Might fit a QM many worlds model and should be investigated further. 5. I have no clue how to even address something like this. Any takers? LC: I'll go for 1, all a big coincidence. Firstly, it should be taken as the default hypothesis. Second, in my opinion no reliable evidence has ever surfaced that points to precognition, or points to a science theory that is an elaboration of QM/GR. In fact, numerous claims of something new are regularly debunked by skeptics, and have picked up the name (rightly, in my opinion) of pseudo-science. RM: Given a set of events that are impossible to reproduce (how can the writer re-create the basis for his story a second time?) we can only examine them after the fact in terms of probabilities. Even if we didn't go to a phonebook and look up the relative number of Silards or Lenzes vs the more common names, it's fairly obvious that the probabilities of this being a chance occurrence are on the order of one in tens of millions. Yet we write this kind of thing off as coincidence. The example I gave, (of course) is a real story titled Blowups Happen written by a real sci fi author--Robert Heinlein. Heinlein was asked about the coincidence, and he said he had no idea where he got the names or the idea. The story itself was *was* written in 1939---many years before the Manhattan District Project was even considered by anyone--and before Szilard began work on nukes and before Kistiakowski began work on his lenses. Most who have written about this focus on the fact that the story is about a uranium bomb at a site in the Arizona desert. But when one gets into the minutiae is where it gets truly weird. Neither Heinlein in 1939-- nor most journalists who wrote about the coincidences since then--- were aware of the explosive lens issue, nor were they aware that most fission nukes have beryllium neutron reflectors. I'll suspect Heinlein chose the name Korzybski from a semi-famous semanticist from the 1920s and 30s named Alfred Korzybski. But to me, the other coincidences are just too weird to ignore. LC writes: In world war II, the FBI did question one man who published a story involving atomic theory or atomic bombs that had some eerie similarities to what was top secret. But they determined that it was just coincidence. I'd be lying if I claimed to be unaffected by that report. RM replies: That would be the Clive Cartmill story Deadline which appeared in a 1944 issue of Astounding magazine. Actually, atomic bombs were accepted as a possibility since HG Wells' 1914 story The World Set Free. INMO, the Cartmill story *is* coincidence. The Heinlein story is *truly* weird. RM
