I am talking about an individual’s paradigm of reality vs reality.
You have your paradigm of reality, I have mine and everybody has their own. However each of our paradigms is largely built on second hand information. We each must evaluate that second hand information. We each have to decide how much attention to pay to the many different things going on in reality. I am not talking about some ABSOLUTE PROBABILITY that we are all supposed to agree with. It doesn’t matter to me if your estimate of the probability is different from mine. I am not sufficiently interested in the Big Bang to study it to try to make a better estimate.
My problem with the Big Bang is the size they say the universe is versus the time since the bang occurred. How did that much mass move that fast? This then brings up the issue of “space” being created. I admit I don’t understand it but I don’t just BELIEVE it either. So I give it a relatively low but greater than 50% probability. I conceded it is ONLY MY RATING. I am not asking anyone else to agree with it. I don’t care who does or does not agree with it.
I bet most people that don’t have degrees in physics don’t understand the Big Bang either. They are just going along with what they regard as SCIENTIFIC AUTHORITY. I was simply explaining to the creator of the OP how I analyze BELIEF vs SCIENCE which applies to many different subjects. I am not interested in going off into 9/11 stuff in this thread.
Conveniently, though, it’s not necessary that every member of a soeciety understand science and engineering. It’s not even necessary that the realize when they’re talking out of their asses about it. The five percent or so of us who do can keep them from starving in the dark while covered in boils, as they certainly would if left to their own devices.
Thank you for helping me illustrate the points I was making to Koxinga. First, the universe doesn’t care a whit if we believe in it. Second, I agree that anyone who hasn’t read the papers and can’t do the math doesn’t really understand the Big Bang. I only passed differential equations because Nixon invaded Cambodia. But anyone can understand the Hubble constant, and anyone can understand the various yardsticks used for measuring the size of the universe. That gives the date of the Big Bang. Second, it isn’t hard to understand why there was a prediction of CBR, and very easy to understand how it was found. The success of that prediction should be enough to raise the truth of the Big Bang to be above 60% for anyone except die-hard steady staters (any of those left?) Further, the lumpiness of the early cosmos is simple to imagine, though I expect the cause for it, which involves information flow being limited by the speed of light, might take some time. The satellite results, showing the lumpiness of the background radiation, as predicted, is enough reason to provisionally buy inflation.
So, no math needed, only basic physics, and no appeal to authority, since you could easily look up primary sources for these predictions before they were confirmed.
BTW, you are also making a fundamental mistake with your version of probability, which is giving it more precision than warranted. By 65%, you probably means something like between 50% and 75%. (or 0 - 100%!) If you have a more precise way of computing this number, please let us know. People are way to ready to make a number be representative of a wide range of uncertainty, and then acting as if that number were rock solid. I see this all the time in papers in my area, and I’ve added warnings about this to my papers and the tutorial I am working on. Hmm, which give me a good idea for a column…
By 100% I mean TRUE with no doubt. By 0% I mean FALSE with no doubt.
50% means don’t know with as much chance of being true as false. Maybe don’t care either.
There has been this relatively recent discovery of the rate of expansion increasing for unknown reasons. When dealing with subjects where I get the impression that there is a lot the experts don’t know but may not necessarily admit how much they don’t know I tend to reduce my probabilities. I think it is great for people with the brains and the curiosity I am not trying to KNOCK THE SCIENCE. I am just saying I don’t necessarily have to have much faith in their pronouncements especially on a subject that doesn’t really affect anyone that I can tell. How much difference does it make whether the universe is 15 billion or 20 billion years old? How much difference does it make whether it is 40 billion or 60 billion light years in diameter? If they find an Earth-like planet 120 light years away it is a nice scientific discovery but what can we do with it? We can’t get to the Moon efficiently.
This cracked me up.
Haven’t read it and am not going to, just heard about it.
Oh yes, lets not forget it. Lets not forget the scientists who exposed it as a hoax, the scientists who didn’t accept it completely, and used science to investigate it. Science is self correcting, precisely because scientists are human.
But wasn’t it science until it was revealed to not be science?
So how can you be absolutely sure when it IS SCIENCE?
BELIEVE NOTHING! Try to understand what you can and want to. When YOU understand it then it’s SCIENCE. Until then it is someone claiming to be a scientist running their mouths. Even if what they say is correct. The Big Bang was just like the Resurrection. They didn’t get it on video tape.
My point is, “How many people BELIEVED that the Piltdown Man business WAS SCIENCE?” for a period of time. How many things have gotten the label SCIENCE and been regarded as correct and then later proved wrong?
That is what is funny about that book on String Theory. If the science is so sophisticated that you can’t understand it for yourself then you are back to taking someone else’s word. You can’t tell whether they are correct or not.
Oh golly, you mean people aren’t perfect? Say it isn’t so!
:rolleyes: It is science that corrects these things. Science allows for new evidence and changes accordingly. Science follows the evidence, there is no need for belief. If the evidence is wrong or incomplete, than new evidence changes it.
Do you drive a car? Did you buy a car from someone who’s word you took that it would function correctly and not explode, or did you build it with your own two hands from metal you mined yourself? Or do you only apply this ‘you can’t tell whether they are correct or not’ policy to some things and not others?
Science is an ABSTRACTION. Science doesn’t DO ANYTHING.
Human beings using the scientific method make decisions about things. But if you don’t understand the subject how do you know whether they were correct or not? So how do YOU decide what is SCIENCE.
As I have been saying. I don’t regard it as 100% unless I understand it. You can make whatever evaluation you want. It is not my fault that you only think in terms of TRUE and FALSE.
I understood planned obsolescence was going on in cars before I graduated from grade school. I have never owned a new car. I haven’t been to an auto show in more than 30 years. I don’t care what any of that under engineered crap looks like.
Notice that our genius economists don’t tell us the total we lose in depreciation on that junk every year. But when we buy more new ones they add it to GDP. Economics is SO SCIENTIFIC!
I don’t need to understand it know if they were correct. I can’t build my own computer from sand and copper, but that doesn’t mean I reject the concept as incorrect. I don’t need to know if they were incorrect or not, the stuff they produce works. Your outlook indicates a lack of understand of science.
You still haven’t explained how you come up with you percentages. If you’re producing them rectally because having a number makes you feel better, then say so.
You do realize this has nothing to do with my question right? You totally avoided it and went off on some tangent about economics and automotive conspiracies. If you could answer my actual question, that would be great.
Good. The Piltdown man wasn’t science. Neither is a dinosaur or a nuclear reactor. Science is a process. The process by which the supposed fossil was doubted and eventually revealed as a hoax, that was science.
No, it shouldn’t be 100% even if you do understand it. You might be wrong, the information might be wrong, or new information might be uncovered.
Now, let’s look at your 50%, Say you have an item which you know nothing about, except that it can be in one of two classes. You’d say the probability would be 50%. But what about one of 3 classes? One of 100? The only real answer to the question of what the probability is is “I don’t know.” Your fallacy is very common, though. I’ve seen experiments showing people tend to assign equal probabilities in this case, even when the results of doing so are absurd. Saying “I don’t know” takes some practice.
Obviously that only applies to the cases where the choices are true or false. If you want to make up situations with more choices and accuse me of being so stupid that I think only true and false applies to EVERYTHING, be my guest. I couldn’t care less.
It isn’t JUST THE PROCESS. It is the knowledge that results from the process. I am simply saying every individual has the right to make their own value judgment about how much to trust that knowledge. I am saying not everyone has to agree 100%. If you trust it more than I do that is your business.
But I haven’t seen a table specifying the TONS of STEEL and TONS of CONCRETE that were on every level of the WTC so you can trust anything you want. I think it is very UNSCIENTIFIC to not demand that information. But how many people regarded the Piltdown Man as science in 1925?
I think a lot of people are just uncomfortable with uncertainty. They want a warm and fuzzy SCIENTIFIC blanket to hold onto and our knowledge of reality just isn’t as good as they want to believe. 20 years wasted on string theory!?! That is rich.
Please explain why choosing one of two things is fundamentally different from choosing one of 3, or 4, or a million. Please also explain why the statement “I don’t know anything that would let me decide” leads directly to “they are equally likely.”
Not a meaning I’ve seen frequently if at all in 40 years of being involved with it. The site seems to be down, so I can’t check the details. And I agree that everyone has the right to their judgment. People have the right to be creationists. But we also have the right to point out that educated judgments count more than ignorant ones.
And I don’t trust it as much as understand it, being on the inside, at least of my little branch.
I assure you I have better things to do than study wacko conspiracy theories, which are no more credible coming from the left than from the right. As for string theory, do you have any idea of what its current status is? How long did people play around with the ether before defining the experiment that would falsify it? I guess it is absurd to think it would take a whole 20 years to understand the very basic structure of the universe. How very lazy of the physicists!
