5 ms·
Here's a quote by Feynman on the topic: “You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight... I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine?
by madrox 8y ago
Here's a quote by Feynman on the topic: “You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight... I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!”
I believe what you're getting at is the Ludic Fallacy, which could probably apply here. That said, whether it's a fallacy in the science or in the reporting, it's hard to say. I have a degree in statistics, and I'd say I spent half the time learning stats, and half the time learning to use language precisely to avoid overgeneralizing stats.
There's a really great TED talk about how even very educated people get it wrong when talking about stats: https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_donnelly_shows_how_stats_fool_juries?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_donnelly_shows_how_stats_foo...
- ALittleLight 8y agoSuppose you know nothing about license plates and I tell you that license plates work one of two ways, either every license plate reads "ARW 357" (it's just a meaningless tradition) or every plate has six randomly selected numbers and letters and there's equal probability that either explanation is true. THEN you observe a single car with a single license plate with the value "ARW 357". Does this single observation tell you anything about reality? I would argue that it does - it should strongly suggest to you that you're in the "every car is ARW 357" reality. Similarly, if you draw a ball from an urn and it's red, and you know you've drawn either from the "urn of red balls", or the "urn of one million green balls and one red one" you should be pretty confident you've drawn from the "urn of red balls". If one theory can explain your observations but the explanation is highly unlikely, and another theory explains your observations and the explanation is likely, the second theory is more likely to be correct all else equal.
- komali2 8y agoOk, this explanation makes a lot of sense. However, are we able to reduce down our understanding of "which universe we're in" in such simple terms? I think I'd understand better if I knew how long we've been capable of detecting oumuamuas.
- jpttsn 8y agoI don’t follow. If my “ancient aliens” theory says that Stonehenge should occur on 50% of planets, would you automatically favor it over any theory that sets steeper odds?
- zazen 8y agoIf I had confidence that you'd formed that theory without prior knowledge of the existence of Stonehenge, then the fact that you'd predicted Stonehenge would indeed be making your theory look pretty good!
- admax88q 8y agoIn fact that is an essential part to how theories are evaluated. Not just by what they explain, but by what they predict. Most theories on physics are evaluated this way. "We theorize that light is a particle, which would explain these properties of light, and means we should expect to see these other properties of light if we test them." If further observation of light matches those properties you predicted then that's pretty good evidence that your theory is on the right track.
- jpttsn 8y agoSo the UFO people are right? They predicted this sort of thing all along, without any prior knowledge of Oumuamua. I don’t recall hearing about fractal comets before?
- zazen 8y agoWe're going to need to think carefully about what is covered by "this sort of thing". If your ancient aliens theory didn't actually predict "Stonehenge", but predicted that the aliens would have left "all sorts of cool weird stuff", and then you point at Stonehenge and say "see, that's the sort of cool stuff I mean", then I'm no longer impressed by the predictive power of your ancient aliens theory. Predictions have to be precise for a theory to be supported by them: they can't be vague generalities. cf. astrologers, who "predict" the future by predicting nothing.
- salty_biscuits 8y agoIt depends on your priors. If you set it up properly the evidence for either model from one sample would be weak. You shouldn't be confident in either model after one trial, but you can eliminate some models, i.e. all balls are green.
- madrox 8y agoYou're correct about choosing between theories, but I think what's being challenged here is how we're determining if something is unlikely or not given our imperfect knowledge...and how it was described in the article. I'm not making the case for aliens here.
- wallace_f 8y agoWhy is it so trendy to discount the possibility of aliens? Your comment and the article have specific, nearly-foremost intent to do that. There's no evidence it is aliens. Obviously it could be, and it's unlikely there are not such things in our universe. It just seems more appropriate to say "there's no evidence it is related to alien tech." Everyone having to say "it's NOT aliens" seems like some sort of cultural phenomenon.
- perl4ever 8y ago"Does this single observation tell you anything about reality? I would argue that it does - it should strongly suggest to you that you're in the "every car is ARW 357" reality." I think this scenario is incoherent after thinking about it for a minute. You say "there is equal probability that either explanation is true" but you imply that you, the storyteller, know something about license plates. Probability is a description of incomplete knowledge, so whose knowledge are we talking about, yours or mine? I see no reason (in my hypothetical ignorance) to exclude the possibility you know I will see "ARW 357" next even if all license plates are different.
- ALittleLight 8y agoThe license plate example is a kind of nonsense magic example to just use the same things that the parent comment was talking about - you should also factor in to your analysis the absurdity of issuing an identical plate to every car, etc. Instead, consider the example with the urns. I think that's a lot more realistic and illustrates the problem.
- chr1 8y agoMaybe there is some process that makes the red ball to always go to the top, so the probability of finding it is larger than one to million. In both cases you do not have enough information to make any conclusions.
- ddxxdd 8y ago>In both cases you do not have enough information to make any conclusions. That's why the field of statistics exists in the first place.
- Jeff_Brown 8y agoThe license plate story is useful, but it does not address the uniqueness problem. We see lots of license plates, and there's nothing particularly special about most combinations of characters. We see lots of rocks, too, but until Oumuamua they were all solar. The distinction between solar and nonsolar is meaningful; indeed, many astronomers have wanted to see a rock from outside the solar system for a long time.
- ordu 8y agoI have no degree in statistics. But I know for sure that any statistics is just meaningless numbers if you have no hypothesis behind it. At the same time the only method to deal with single observation I know is bayesian statistics. As I understand this statistics have an answer "observation of Oumuamua raises probability that there are many objects like this in the interstellar space". We can suggest that there are N classes of objects in space, we picked one at random, and it happens to be Oumuamua belonging to the class of Oumuamua-like. To one of N classes. The more some class is common, the more probability for us to see element from this class. Here we can use Bayes' theorem and conclude that the fact of observation of Oumuamua is a weak evidence that the class of Oumuamua-like is more common in the interstellar space than any other class. It is a weak evidence, and I dont know how much is it. But the point is this evidence points to an ordinariness of objects like Oumuamua not to a rareness.