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"Plenty of sense" is a subjective measure that can't be quantified. A person could just add easily state that it makes plenty of sense to concentrate some resou
by dventimi 3y ago
"Plenty of sense" is a subjective measure that can't be quantified. A person could just add easily state that it makes plenty of sense to concentrate some resources on a few or even just one line of inquiry, because of the perceived payoff. Nobody would be in a position to tell that person they're wrong.
- angiosperm 3y agoDollars have always been strictly quantitative. A dollar spent on experiment A is a dollar not spent on experiments B through Z.
- dventimi 3y agoI was talking about the value of the outcomes.
- angiosperm 3y agoYou miss the point that the value of the outcomes correlates poorly with the expense of the experiment. Therefore, a hundred cheap experiments promise a hundred times the value of one expensive experiment. Compared to dark matter detection experiments, an infinitely greater value, as against the conspicuously zero denominator.
- dventimi 3y agoYou miss the point that you don't know the value of the outcomes. Nobody does because being a matter of judgment about conditions in an unknown future, that's not something that can be known. The best we can do is make educated guesses about potential value. My personal educated guess is that the potential value to fundamental physics of identifying dark matter is great enough to justify the cost of trying. You're free to disagree, but you're in no position to say I'm wrong.
- angiosperm 3y agoStatistics is a science. "Uncorrelated" means something concrete and quantitative. Learning what that means might enable you to produce the sort of educated guesses the rest of science does routinely, and that lead inexorably to the expectation that an abundance of cheaper experiments produce greater value than a few expensive ones. "Expectation" also means something concrete and quantitative.
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- dventimi 3y agoPersonally, I value determining the dark energy equation of state to be more valuable than discovering room temperature superconductors. My wife's view is the opposite. Which of us right, and why?
- angiosperm 3y agoShe is, obviously. But it is the wrong question. At issue was whether a hundred other experiments were worth more than a single dark matter experiment. (There are no dark energy experiments.) And, statistically, they are, for statistically compelling reasons that are nonetheless wholly accessible without the formal mathematics.
- dventimi 3y agoIt's not obvious to me so if you want to persuade me you'll have to make an argument. While you're at it you'll have to make another argument if you want to persuade me you're in a position to know which are the right questions and which are the wrong ones. Finally, if the dark energy equation of state can't be measured with experiments, you should've told the Department of Energy. You could've saved them a lot of money. https://science.osti.gov/hep/Highlights/2019/HEP-2019-08-a https://science.osti.gov/hep/Highlights/2019/HEP-2019-08-a It's not too late to save them even more money, though: https://lsstdesc.org/ https://lsstdesc.org/