I think ten days is normally considered to be about the 50% threshold, for general accuracy. Models out further than that are useful for some uses, But if you are planning your activity around it, be prepared to be disappointed.
However, you can still make some long-term predictions that are likely to hold. Predicting that July is likely to be warmer than May is easy enough, although anynindividual day in March could be warmer or colder than any individual day in July. Hell, we’ve had warm days in January in Edmonton that were warmer than a cold day in July.
In economics, it’s a pretty good bet to say that global GDP will be higher 100 years from now. It’s not guaranteed, as we could have a war, or a depression, or a series of pandemics, or an asteroid strike or anynnumber of things that could invalidate that prediction, but it’s still the way to bet. It’s when you get into specifics that you get into trouble, because the future is a random walk.
In CA I have cynically shortened reliability to three days the past few years and I probably monitor the local and regional weather a bit more obsessively than the average mook. I’ve seen far too many seven day forecasts go splat and even five day forecasts get heavily attenuated too often for my tastes.
Typically what I notice is that if I look at the 10 day forecast on a Monday, it’ll say that it’s going to rain on the following Sunday. Then if I look again on Wednesday, it might say it’ll rain on Tuesday morning. If I check again on Saturday, it’ll say that it’ll rain on Sunday night between 7 and 9, and that’s going to be pretty accurate.
Basically anything over about 5 days, but less than 10 is broadly accurate- “it’ll rain next week” kind of stuff. For me, that means to check back over the next several days to see how the forecast is coalescing into something firm- usually by the 3 to 5 day range, it’s accurate enough to use in making plans.
In Nate Silver’s book he noted that local weather forecasts were biased to predict rain, since if it was sunny when rain was predicted the audience would be happy, but if it rained when good weather was predicted those who were surprised by rain during outdoor activities would be mad.
Half assed or not, count me in with those who disagree with Sam. It’s most certainly possible to believe in a god who created the universe but who had no direct hand in the evolution of life on the third planet of an ordinary star in the backwaters of an ordinary galaxy. There is a very large amount of evidence supporting the the theory of evolution by means of natural selection. On the other hand, as far as I know, there isn’t any evidence at all to support whatever hypotheses exist about where the universe as a whole came from. My understanding, which I’m sure is flawed, is that the fundamental laws of thermodynamics such as conservation of energy and the continual increase in entropy, don’t leave much, if any, wiggle room for an explanation of the Big Bang based on currently accepted theories.
To make a long story short, I’ve adopted the position of deism, believing that something significantly different from all the things that exists in our universe had to be responsible for the Big Bang. But whatever that is has nothing to do with evolution on our planet, other than having set the whole universe in motion.
It’s still an open question how the entropy got so low for the initial singularity. Really, the only reason “God did it” is an unacceptable answer is that it doesn’t actually explain anything. There are really no good explanations right now. Even anthropic explanations (i.e., the universe is the way it is because we’re here to observe it) are unsatisfying–the universe is much bigger than it needs to be to produce us.
That’s kind of my point. I think the pushback on deism, in general, tends to be that the word god is a loaded term. But it doesn’t have to mean some old white man with a beard like Yahweh, Zeus, Odin, etc. It could just as easily mean some kind of impersonal force which is capable of creating a Big Bang but which isn’t currently present in our universe.
That very rapidly gets into a kind of fuzzy spiritualism. Eventually you’re just saying that “god” is another name for the the laws of the universe. Fine, but it doesn’t offer any explanatory power. We can talk about elegance, beauty, symmetry, simplicity, etc. when formulating physical laws but throwing god into the mix doesn’t really help anything. Maybe some scientists feel that elegance has to spring from a conscious force but there’s no reason to actually believe that. And it is perfectly possible to seek elegance without being motivated to understand the mind of god (or some other mumbo jumbo).
It’s not so much an explanation as it is a statement of a problem. Either our universe is all there is to existence, or it isn’t. If it is all there is to existence, then it seem that the fundamental laws of thermodynamics are flawed. I decided to reject that particular hypothesis because it doesn’t make sense that the only exception to those laws is the Big Bang itself, and that other than that one event, everything else since then has behaved in accordance with those laws.
If there exists something else other than our current universe, then we would no longer be dealing just with the laws of our own universe, but with something else. What might that be? Who knows, but whatever it is, it’s not something we can explain with the laws of this universe as we currently know them (at least based on my understanding to those laws).
The next step is, admittedly, a personal preference. Given that we have no data as to what we would be dealing with, I see no reason to reject using the term god in favor of terms like quantum theory, general relativity, or string theory. After all, we have no idea what we’re dealing with as the source of the Big Bang, so one term is as good as any other at this point. There’s no need to invoke spiritualism. Fuzzy, of course, is inherent in the problem, because we have no technology at present to study something like the origin of the Big Bang, so whatever term or phrases we use, it’s going to be fuzzy due to that.
The laws of thermodynamics are statistical. They are violated all the time on tiny scales of time and space. It is only when you have bulk amounts of particles that they become overwhelmingly probable.
On the scale of infinite time and space, the conditions of the big bang, as significant as they are to us, are as insignificant as when an individual molecule of gas moves in the direction of greater concentration rather than lower.
That is of course, assuming that the laws of thermodynamics mean anything at all outside of our universe, and that they are not simply a property that exists only within it, no putting any requirements that they rule outside of it.
But that is not to say that we will never be able to explain them.
I see this as a direct contradiction. Using the term god is invoking spiritualism. Much of religion has been based on using it to explain the unknown. Thousands of years ago, there was a whole lot we didn’t know about the world, much less the universe, so religion had a large part to play. As we have learned more, those who cling to religion have kept shoving their god into the gaps in our knowledge, and fighting against advances that would narrow those gaps even further.
The only “god” that I see as plausible is that of AC in “The Last Question.”
If I might be so bold as to hijack this thread about theology with a discussion of cultural grievance as a governing agenda, the Atlantic has a piece out today that breaks down the GOP’s playbook pretty well; “Find a misunderstood or marginalized group, convince voters that the members of that group pose an existential threat to society, and then ride to victory on the promise of using state power to crush them.”
Yeah. That’s there strategy. Whether they succeed or not is the question. The way I see it the GOP has three options. I’ll list them from what the GOP would probably consider the most to least palatable.
Succeed with the strategy as is. Get enough GOP voters in their one big tent to outvote the Democratic voters in their multiple smaller tents. Since the multiple smaller Democratic voter tents are collectively larger than the one large GOP tent, they have to somehow succeed in suppressing the Democratic vote.
Succeed by “inviting” some of the members from the Democratic groups over into the GOP tent. They almost succeeded with this strategy in 2020 by appealing to conservative young Black and Latino men. Whether the GOP will continue on this route, and how successful they would be if they try, is to be determined.
Blow up the whole thing and go back to being old fashioned conservatives rather than being the party of cultural grievance. Probably not possible at this point but I think this would be the best outcome for the nation as a whole. The big problem with this plan from the GOP perspective is that a significant part of their base is there solely because of cultural grievance. A lot of them care very little about the old fashioned conservatism of people like Bill Kristol, William Buckley, and George Will.
that includes a discussion of several possible explanations for the origins of the universe. None of them are widely accepted, I doubt any even rise to the level of theories, but there are lots of possibilities that are scientifically based without resorting to any kind of spirit or deity.
I read a lot in this area and there are a bunch I never heard of.
It’s also a good book.
Just a nitpick, but anthropic explanations only justify why the universe can support life like us, and are a minimum set of requirements. They don’t imply that the universe was designed to support us. Noting that the universe is really, really big is a good argument against special creation for us - the ancients tiny universe makes a lot more sense in that context.
After all, why aren’t intelligent beings on Mars complaining that the place isn’t fit to support life?
As the article glances at but doesn’t elaborate on, the GOP is always finding new “threat” groups while never definitively getting rid of their old ones. If you look at the 2020 Republican Party platform (which is kind of an unintentionally hilarious read these days because they just kept the 2016 platform so they could leave in all the Obama-bashing without having to actually address any of the Trumpery), you’ll see all the past “threat” language still firmly in place.
“Attacks on marriage”, “Islamic terrorism”, immigrant “criminal gangs”, and so on, are kept handy to be re-cast at any time as the Republican boogeyman [i]du jour[/b]. It’s just that they have to keep changing it up to maintain the audience’s outrage and fear levels.
If God created the universe you cannot say he didn’t have a hand in creating life on Earth; he would therefore have created the laws of physics that led to life arising. An omnipotent universe-creating God created life on Earth, you cannot avoid that. You’re only arguing over when he last nudged the model; was it 13 billion years ago or 3 billion?
