61–70 of 70 posts
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I’m not so sure that’s true: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/mh370-m...
Wow, thanks for that, that is a fantastic write-up, and a pretty compelling argument (at least to me) that the mystery of MH370 has been mostly "solved" (spoiler alert: all evidence points to a murder-suicide by pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah).
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Counterintuitively, extremely unlikely events like this happen very often. The odds of a specific event like this are astronomically small, but there is an even more astronomically large number of different possible unlikely events. The sheer number of possible events is orders of magnitude greater than the odds of individual unlikely events, causing them to occur regularly. The universe is a really weird place, wher…
Sometimes, I drop something by accident, and the object falls in a strange way. I think "I could never in a million years duplicate the path that took."
I still remember, from at least twenty years ago, an anti-duplication technology based on this idea. IIRC it involved embedding glitter in clear plastic and then measuring the reflections at different angles. Devilishly hard to duplicate, especially since one wouldn't know which angles would be used in a reading so the placement would have to be nearly perfect in every dimension. Unfortunately so would the alignment in a reader, which I think is what sank the idea. Still, the idea of physically embodying something so similar to a mathematical proof of work seems valid and quite appealing. "I could never in a million years make the glitter fall that way again."
P.S. Here's a modern application of a similar technique to detect tampering with a laptop. https://archive.ph/g1kDW
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You sure about that? Humans regularly work at 30x atmospheric pressure and can probably go to 100x https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/32640/what-is-the-...
I don't think airplane hulls are designed for more than 1 Atm of pressure differential between cabin and the outside; according to the wikipedia article [0] on cabin pressurization normal values are between 540 and 690 hPa pressure differential are normal. If the cabin has an overpressure event, the hull might pop like a balloon, leading to a decompression event. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabin_pressurization
The odds of this seem astronomically small.
Given what the documentary crew was up to, it seems probable the debris showed up on sonar and the dive team went down to check it out.
So it is not exactly a chance discovery in the deep Atlantic by tourists on holiday. It is well funded professionals discovering something that looks a lot like what they were looking for.
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If you insist on using old fashioned logic to reason when in a probabilistic universe where that kind of reasoning is only an approximation, you can say that the universes you are talking about don't exist. They are such a small fraction of possible universes, that you can safely 'know' you aren't in any of them without checking.
This comment misses the point and just plays with the meaning of “know”. Not that epistemology isn’t interesting, but parent was referring to absolute certainty (contingent on your senses being accurate, of course).
I'll also note that I did miss the point of the OPs comment, but I think not in the way you suggested.
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Imagine if you took the Everettian interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.
If it is true, doesn’t it follow that there are (very rare) universes where unlikely events happen so often that anyone in such a universe would effectively observe a different probability distribution of events? The thing is, if the theory is true, how do we know we are not in such a universe? We can say it is extremely unlikely because they are very rare - but we say it is “unlikely” and “rare” because we assume th…
I don't think MWI is assuming the global (multiverse-wide) probability distribution is similar to the local (this universe) one, but rather than local probabilities directly arise from the global probability distribution, they are the same. If you do an experiment (e.g. wavefunction collapse) the outcomes we observe in a given experiment are each a single sample from the global distribution. Some outcomes can be highly unlikely and give a skewed view of the global distribution, but a larger number of experiments will always converge to the global distribution.
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The odds of this group of people, on this day, finding this piece of the shuttle, are of course astronomically small. The odds of some group out of millions of people, on some day out of ten thousand since the incident, finding some piece of debris out of thousands, are considerably higher. This is the multiple-endpoints fallacy. You only notice the events that happened after the fact, you never notice everything tha…
Exactly. This is why it is dumb when people say "The odds against life arising at random is astronomical." It did happen, therefore, the convoluted path to life wasn't what the skeptic speaker thinks it was. Multiple-endpoints fallacy and overly anthropomorphizing reality also makes a fool out of the Drake Equation, and the idea of "The Great Filter" is dumb too.
But I'm not so sure about that last. The Drake equation and Great Filter do handle the multiple-endpoints question correctly. They ask, with so many possible occurrences in the scale of the universe, why don't we see any of them?
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"Fiction has to make sense, reality can do whatever it wants."
You sound like someone who has witnessed the last 5 years.
Clancy here expresses an idea evoked in similar statements made by others, all derived from the orignial made by Lord Byron:
Lord Byron: Truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.
Mark Twain: Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities, truth isn't.
G. K. Chesterton: Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.
Leo Rosten: Truth is stranger than fiction; fiction has to make sense. (attributed)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tom_Clancy#Larry_King_Live_(20...
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You sure about that? Humans regularly work at 30x atmospheric pressure and can probably go to 100x https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/32640/what-is-the-...
These seem to talk mostly about diving, where you breathe from a regulated air supply. I assume that air supply is not at 30-100x atmospheric pressure?
We are remarkably good at handling higher pressures.
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If it is true, doesn’t it follow that there are (very rare) universes where unlikely events happen so often that anyone in such a universe would effectively observe a different probability distribution of events? The thing is, if the theory is true, how do we know we are not in such a universe? We can say it is extremely unlikely because they are very rare - but we say it is “unlikely” and “rare” because we assume th…
skissane, after re-reading your comment, I realize I did mis-understand your point, but in a different way than the other commenter suggested. I don't think MWI is assuming the global (multiverse-wide) probability distribution is similar to the local (this universe) one, but rather than local probabilities directly arise from the global probability distribution, they are the same. If you do an experiment (e.g. wavefu…
But don't there exist universes in which that fails to happen? Consider a binary quantum experiment for which the global distribution is 0.5 (we might call it a "quantum coin flip"). If I repeat the experiment often enough, will it always converge to the global distribution? Well, suppose I have an ordinary (non-quantum) fair coin, and flip it one million times – what is the odds of it coming up heads every time? If I've got my maths right, 2^(-10^6) – so beyond astronomically unlikely, its probability is for all practical purposes indistinguishable from zero.
And yet, if MWI is right, then if I flip a "fair quantum coin" one million times, there are universes (just as "real" as ours) in which it comes up heads every single time. 2^(-10^6) is unbelievably small, but it isn't zero. Indeed, no matter how many observations occur, the probability of getting them all wrong just by chance remains non-zero – and, according to the MWI, everything with a non-zero probability in the global distribution actually exists. If MWI is true, there is no limit to how misled some actually existent observers will be.
Hence, by MWI, there are universes, just as real as ours, containing observers who (purely by chance) are consistently misled by their experiments, and therefore conclude that the global distribution is very different from what it actually is. But, if such observers exist, how do we know we are not them? We can say that, by the global distribution, they must be exceedingly rare, so it is exceedingly unlikely we are among them – but that argument relies on the assumption that our locally observed distribution is a reliable guide to the global distribution, which is the very thing it is setting out to prove – and hence must fail as a circular argument. With that argument dismissed, we are left with this conclusion: if MWI is true, we cannot know what the global distribution actually is. That contradicts one of the foundational claims of MWI; therefore, reductio ad absurdum, MWI is false.
This is different from classical sceptical arguments "what if our senses mislead us?", because it argues (if MWI is true) that such misled observers will exist, and the only question is how do we know we are not among them. Classical sceptical arguments are a lot weaker because they are not arguing from the (assumed) actual existence of such deceived observers, only from the (even remote) abstract possibility of their existence. But, if MWI gives sceptical arguments a huge boost - isn't that in itself a good argument against MWI? It renders MWI a self-undermining theory, and theories which undermine themselves ultimately refute themselves.
One might save MWI from this argument by assuming there is some "minimum probability", such that only universes whose probability rises to that minimum actually exist – if all the "misleading" universes are beneath that probability cutoff, no misleading universes exist, so we who exist could not possibly belong to any of them. However, this solution seems rather reminiscent of Ptolemy's epicycles.