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I know you're joking, but there's a general principle at work here. Suppose you make a prediction (e.g. "There will be a great cataclysm in 2010!") that later t
by pjscott 16y ago
I know you're joking, but there's a general principle at work here. Suppose you make a prediction (e.g. "There will be a great cataclysm in 2010!") that later turns out to have been correct in some way (e.g. an earthquake hits Haiti). Your prediction was only useful to the extent that it could have helped someone anticipate the Haiti earthquake. A sufficiently vague statement doesn't tell people anything, even if it turns out to have been technically correct.
Bringing it back on topic: if New Age guys talk about fractal crystal handwavium, and later scientists find some genuine science involving fractals and crystals, that doesn't mean the New Age hippies predicted it. A good prediction is a specific prediction. You could call this the anti-Nostradamus principle, but really it's just a generalization of the idea that a theory ought to be falsifiable.
- mishmash 16y agoSorry to stay a bit off-topic, but if you haven't watched Penn and Teller's Bullshit show - they bust these type of "predictions" all the time. And usually, it's pretty funny. Although they probably don't think of each other as "hackers," they very much are in my opinion. http://www.sho.com/site/ptbs/home.do http://www.sho.com/site/ptbs/home.do edit: I suppose a NSFW warning would be in order.
- akshayubhat 16y agoThe paper does not talks anything about Stock Market and Leaf Patterns, thats bad journalism which is what you are reading in the last two paragraphs. And stock market is scale free, which means if i showed you a randomly selected part of the graph [without range of values] of stock of say Apple or Google you wont be able to tell whether the variation is for a single day or a minute or a year or a decade. Thats what is implied by the scale free nature. Fractals are Scale invariant but not all Scale invariant things are fractals.
- alecco 16y agoYes, belief in magic coincidences is fueled by the impairment of human intuition with respect to probabilities. Birthday paradox/problem.