4 ms·

> no kind of statistical reasoning makes any sense Probabilities are useful when you don't have perfect knowledge. But yes, they are an illusion. In truth, eve

by elwell 6y ago

> no kind of statistical reasoning makes any sense Probabilities are useful when you don't have perfect knowledge. But yes, they are an illusion. In truth, every event has a 100% chance of happening. And things that didn't happen aren't real events, they just seemed to be possible, but we were wrong.

tsimionescu 6y ago
Sure, but please stop requiring clinical trials for new medicine, as they have no more relevance than throwing a coin. Oh, and stop throwing coins, as the result is correlated with the future decision which you will take anyway. In general, all of modern science, starting with quantum mechanics, depends on the idea that statistical independence exists. To truly abandon this idea, we would abandon almost all of the mathematical apparatus that has given us QM and all experimental observations of QM.
- elwell 6y ago
  No principal investigator of a clinical trial has perfect knowledge of the current state of reality, nor the means to calculate subsequent states. Therefore statistics are very useful.
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    They may or may not have perfect knowledge, but if they don't have free will or any ability to randomly choose participants, then there is no reason to trust that the patients they choose are not correlated to the medicine they are testing, such that all of the patients they chose will have the maximum response possible to the medicine, with the least amount of side effects.
    - elwell 6y ago
      > They may or may not have perfect knowledge At least as I was using the term, no one has perfect knowledge. > ability to randomly choose participants Here, pseudorandom is good enough, and I think all we have.
      - tsimionescu 6y ago
        The whole premise of superdeterminism is that things which we deem to be uncorrelated are in fact correlated in such a way as to respect Bell inequalities while still preserving local realism. The bell inequalities have been shown to hold true when the measuring 'decision' was left to signals coming from a pulsar some untold number of millions of light years away, implying that the particle you just generated today has its hidden state correlated with the state of that pulsar that many million years ago. So it seems that nature must be much more highly correlated that we would expect, so I don't know what you would trust as pseudo-random anymore. Perhaps at some point we will be able to do the same triggered by fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation, proving that either quantum entanglement is not both local and real, or that the state of the two particles you just generated was decided at the big bang in such a way as to seem like the Bell inequalities are true.

by elwell 6y ago

tsimionescu 6y ago

Sure, but please stop requiring clinical trials for new medicine, as they have no more relevance than throwing a coin. Oh, and stop throwing coins, as the result is correlated with the future decision which you will take anyway. In general, all of modern science, starting with quantum mechanics, depends on the idea that statistical independence exists. To truly abandon this idea, we would abandon almost all of the mathematical apparatus that has given us QM and all experimental observations of QM.

elwell 6y ago
No principal investigator of a clinical trial has perfect knowledge of the current state of reality, nor the means to calculate subsequent states. Therefore statistics are very useful.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  They may or may not have perfect knowledge, but if they don't have free will or any ability to randomly choose participants, then there is no reason to trust that the patients they choose are not correlated to the medicine they are testing, such that all of the patients they chose will have the maximum response possible to the medicine, with the least amount of side effects.
  - elwell 6y ago
    > They may or may not have perfect knowledge At least as I was using the term, no one has perfect knowledge. > ability to randomly choose participants Here, pseudorandom is good enough, and I think all we have.
    - tsimionescu 6y ago
      The whole premise of superdeterminism is that things which we deem to be uncorrelated are in fact correlated in such a way as to respect Bell inequalities while still preserving local realism. The bell inequalities have been shown to hold true when the measuring 'decision' was left to signals coming from a pulsar some untold number of millions of light years away, implying that the particle you just generated today has its hidden state correlated with the state of that pulsar that many million years ago. So it seems that nature must be much more highly correlated that we would expect, so I don't know what you would trust as pseudo-random anymore. Perhaps at some point we will be able to do the same triggered by fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation, proving that either quantum entanglement is not both local and real, or that the state of the two particles you just generated was decided at the big bang in such a way as to seem like the Bell inequalities are true.