Two stories, superficially unrelated, neatly tied together by a deep lesson at the end.
The first is the case of Lucia de Berk, a Dutch nurse sentenced to life imprisonment in 2003 for multiple murders of patients under her care. However, there was very little direct evidence tying her specifically to the deaths of the individual cases. Much of the prosecution’s case against her was statistical: it was simply extremely unlikely, they argued, that so many patients would die under the care of a single nurse. Numbers like “one in 342 million chance” were bandied about.
But statistics can be tricky. Dutch mathematician Richard Gill has gone over the reasoning presented in the case, and found it utterly wrong-headed; he has organized a petition asking Dutch courts to re-open the case. Gill estimates that 1 in 9 nurses would experience a similar concentration of incidents during their shifts. And he notes that there were a total of six deaths in the ward where de Berk worked during the three years she was there, and seven deaths in the same ward during the three years before she arrived. Usually, the arrival of serial killers does not cause the mortality rate to decrease.
But patients had died, some of them young children, and someone had to be responsible. Incidents that had originally been classified as completely natural were re-examined and judged to be suspicious, after the investigation into de Berk’s activities started. The worst kinds of confirmation bias were in evidence. Here is a picture of what de Berk actually looks like, along with a courtroom caricature published in the newspapers.
Also, she read Tarot cards. Clearly, this is a woman who is witch-like and evil, and deserved to be punished.
The other story involves a brilliant piece of psychological insight from Peter Sagal’s The Book of Vice, previously lauded in these pages. It involves the reason why people play slot machines, or gamble more generally. There are many complicated factors that go into such a phenomenon, of course, but it nevertheless remains a deep puzzle why people would find it so compelling to roll the dice when everyone knows the odds are against you.
Peter asks us to consider the following joke:
An old man goes to the synagogue and prays, every day, thusly: “God, let me win the lottery. Please, just one big win. I’ll give money to the poor, and live a righteous life. . . . Please, let me win the lottery!”
For years, he comes to the synagogue, and the same prayer goes up: “Let me win the lottery! Please, Lord, won’t you show your grace, and let me win the lottery!”
Finally, one day, after fifteen years of this, as the man mutters, “The lottery, Lord, let me win the lottery. . . ,” a golden light suffuses the sanctuary, and a chorus of angels singing a major C chord is heard. The man looks up, tears in his blinded eyes, and says, “Lord . . . ?”
And a deep resonant voice rings out, “Please . . . would you please BUY A TICKET already?”
And that’s why we gamble: so God can answer our prayers. Fortune’s wheel, in other words, might occasionally want to favor us, but how can it if we don’t give it a chance? By playing the slots, we make it so much easier for Providence to bestow its bounty upon our deserving heads.
The common thread, of course, is the deep-seated aversion that human beings have to accepting randomness in the universe. We are great pattern-recognizers, even when patterns aren’t really there. Conversely, we are really bad at accepting that unlikely things will occasionally happen, if we wait long enough. When people are asked to write down a “random” sequence of coin flips, the mistake they inevitably make is not to include enough long sequences of the same result.
Human beings don’t want to accept radical contingency. They want things to have explanations, even the laws of physics. They want life to have a purpose, chance events to have meaning, and children’s deaths to have a person to blame. They want life to make sense, and they want to hit the triple jackpot because they’ve been through a lot of suffering and they damn well deserve it.
Of course, sometimes things do happen for a reason. And sometimes they don’t. That’s life here at the edge of chaos, and I for one enjoy the ride.
Anthony Shaughnessy wrote: “Changing focus slightly, you say “Here’s a picture of what de Berk actually looks like…” – its interesting that you place so much credence on the accuracy of the photograph.” This is a good point. At http://www.luciadeb.nl you can seen just about all the family snap-shots which are around of Lucia. I think they make a consistent 3+1 D view of the woman. She was BTW prom queen when at high school in Vancouver.
The artists’ drawings of Lucia de Berk during the trial showed a woman who *everyone* at that moment knew to be a dreadful killer. I should imagine that she was somewhat stressed by what was going on to her (supposing just for a moment that she was innocent). Did you know that the Dutch police are the last police force in the civilized world who are not obliged to tape interogations with suspects? And that the suspects’ lawyer is not allowed to be present either? (they say it would cramp their style). The wily judges were out to trap her with little inconsistencies in her statements about events of 5, 6 years previously where her word was pitted against the word of a top medical specialist. She speaks rather low class Dutch and the judges and scientific experts of course all speak terribly proper.
So she looked haggard. She has a rather striking profile, I guess that when she is 70 or 80 she will might look quite witch-like from some angles. She will certainly look like a very strong very wise old woman by that time, if she is still around, who has been in hell and come back to tell us about it. You can see her daughter – who looks much like her – on some tv interviews on the web. Vivacious, intelligent, independent minded.
I have visited Lucia a few times in jail now, and I can vouch for the fact that if she is at her ease, she comes across as a very warm and open and intelligent and perhaps a little naive woman [I gues her naivety will have been cured by now after 6 years in jail], she does have a theatrical style, and is definitely not a run of the mill person. A strong personality (and in fact she must be incredibly tough still to be up and fighting, despite the stroke she has had – on hearing the incredible Supreme Court verdict – which paralysed the right side of her body.
“the deep-seated aversion that human beings have to accepting randomness in the universe” – yes this is a good point.
I think there is a deep-seated aversion among physicists which is holding physics back, these days, from the great challenge of sorting out the relation between quantum theory and relativity. IF ONLY physicists would realise what quantum theory and experiment has been shouting at them in their faces for nearly a hundred years now: nature is fundamentally random. Nature is continually choosing, for no reason whatsoever, one of many possible branches on which to travel further. But: it is not chaos. There is method to nature’s madness, and that method is that the probabilities satisfy beautiful physical laws which are as accurate, as far as we can see, as any laws known yet in physics.
Quantum physics is also saying that there is an arrow of time. Nature is continually choosing, at random, one of many possible branches. When you run the film of actual reality backwards, it does NOT look the same. The dice does not jump back into the beaker. The coin does not return to your fist.
Computational cosmologists do seem to understand this well. In Leiden, Vincent Icke’s group makes beautiful movies of the universe. The simulations are stochastic. They never produce OUR particular universe; they keep producing possible universes, which tend to look quite like ours in general features, but all the stars and all the galaxies are born in quite different times and places, if at all, in every alternative universe. In each step of the simulation, all the particles of the universe decide where they are going to be next, according to the stochastic laws of quantum physics. Space-time is continually “collapsing” out of the waves of all possible future space-times.
Those movies do not look the same, when they are run backwards.
Talking about “expectation values” and accusing people of being irrational is sometimes also a stupid and self-satisfied behaviour.
The EV only makes sense, when the law of the large numbers has already hit (or you’re expecting it in your near future/lifetime). Your house has to burn down several times and you have to win a bunch of lotteries to rate insurances on the base of EV.
Otherwise. you have a huge intervall of possible outcomes and the EV is only the mean of these outcomes.
Furthermore, you should not use the bare money values, but your personal utility function for such calculations (meaning to value a win in the lottery more, than the losses). So fh’s comment could also make total sense from a statistical, “rational” point of view.
Richard,
Are the dice and the coin moving in an absolute frame of reference, or one where ‘For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaaction?’
To the hands of the clock, it’s the face going counterclockwise. The “waves of all possible future space-times” are collapsing into the order of past circumstance. The information of events goes from future to past, as energy creates future events out of its past order. Energy does not move along the dimension of time, it creates it.
I think that it should be complemented with:
(I saw it at:
http://hittingthefanrenaissance.wordpress.com/2007/09/13/mientras-pienso/ but they didn’t know the author).
I think I can see where Sean’s going with this.
It’s a similar argument to that advanced by Gregory Chaitin, e.g. in “Meta Math!: The Quest for Omega”.
If the whole ‘universe’ follows an algorithm (assuming the whole universe can be defined) it’s necessary to be able to produce a program desribing its behaviour that’s smaller than all of the data, or states that it’s composed of.
For sub-systems of the ‘universe’, that’s often possible – and often not.
For the ‘universe’ that’s not been achieved at all.
Celestial Toymaker: The universe can’t follow an algorithm, since true probabilistic collapse events and decays etc. are really not produced by any algorithm. You can use kludgy psuedorandom approximations like digits of roots (but application to a universe simulation would have to be “put in by hand”), or cheat and pretend that “random variables” can be defined and used by fiat even though no mathematical process actually produces true unpredictable randomness in principle (or it wouldn’t really be a mathematical structure at work.) As for the BS pretensions that there are valid schemes to avoid collapse, please see my contemporaneous post at the Turtles thread.
Neil B wrote:
But, as you are probably aware, the evolution of multiverse of the Many Worlds interpretation is fully determined. Its evolution can therefore be expressed as an algorithm.
Belizean (resident of Belize I presume?): Sure, the evolution of the “multiverse” is determined in the sense that it’s just the evolution of “waves” with a pretense of collape events sprinkled all over and then separated (like powdered sugar instead of a single event: e.g. we just cover the sphere surrounding the photon emitter with impacts all over and pretend that each little sparkling is in its own “universe” and so on ad nauseum.) I consider that utterly worthless. If collapse never occured, it just wouldn’t occur period and it would just be the waves forever and ever (like waves on a pond) and not a way to dodge or explain the localization events. And I still can’t predict what *I’m* going to see with such notions, which is what “science” is supposed to be all about. The multiple worlds conceit won’t even let me ask, “What pattern will I see next” because there’s no real future for “me” as an individual – but we all experience that there is, and the whole scam is a silly geeky pretension. An honest person would just admit that we don’t get how that works and find another way to deal with it.
Actually, in practice we can’t even measure the form of the wave functions themselves (even if we can create specific ones like a linear polarized photon at 20 degrees) so their having a particular deterministic magnitude at each moment of time is not really effectively/knowably “there” but just assumed for mathematical modelling. Consider for example, we can’t find the absolute phase of a single photon, which means it isn’t “given” the way the equation of a sine or other wave is an explicit and exact amplitude being function of space and time. We don’t know exactly when the photon was emitted, or its exact coherence length (number of “wavings” from the Fourier composition) and ergo it does not even constitue an exact mathematical function of a “wave.” So, even that pretense isn’t really true in any *meaningful* sense. Whatever happened to empiricism, logical positivism, etc? It looks like “the rules are for the plebes” to many theorists.
Is that a reference to Bill Hicks at the end?
Neil, the wavefunction of the multiverse is actually static. It satisfies the equation:
H|psi>=0
Time evolution is an illusion. You exist now and you have a copies that exist yesterday and tomorrow etc. There exists a mapping that preserves information which we call “time evolution”…
Typo, let’s try again:
H|psi>=0
Iblis, you shouldn’t say “The wavefunction of the multiverse is actually static” as if anyone actually knew that – it’s just how those who believe in this conceit think that it should be described. And, it still doesn’t really derive or explain there being any “hits” at all – whether the wave is “static” (in the silly sense of misinterpreting the ultimate significance of the Minkowski diagram, just because time was simply *graphed* with space all in one piece, as if that actually made time go away?) or “dynamic.”
Glib talk of our most fundamental experiences (in the classic shared scientific sense too, not the highly individual/subjective sense) as being “illusions” is presumptous and so antithetical to the orginal spirit of empiricism – I see no reason to surrender the empirical given to a bunch of affectedly too-clever-by-half, post-modern pseudoscientists. If you or I decide to do an experiment, you or I will get such and such result. Denying that is crank science of another sort. Why don’t all the neo-atheists who gripe about “woo-woo-ism” whenever it might support “purpose” in the universe, jump on this flaky indulgence? For the same reason political partisans ignore anything wrong their own party does, etc.
No offense to you Iblis – I always got the impression you’re sincere and guileless. If you really believe in that mess, well OK some dig surreal fantasy worlds of physics even though the “real” world is biting us very differently in the @$$. Actually, I wish you’d post again to your interesting blog, but here’s another request for now: take a critical look at what I’ve been ragging against and tell me if you really still think it’s attractive in the sense of being valid, not in the sense of providing “relief” from being irritated by the inexplicable (like WF collapse, which a real man or woman just says “it is what it is…”)
Say, can you or anyone else make out and critique what Greg is trying to say about different rates of free fall not really being different in the sense that matters? He seems hip to the high-brow theory, but to be torturing the semantics.
Marius: I had forgotten about him, but did find the quote “The political class that rules always feels there is one set of rules for the plebes and another set for themselves.” at http://freestudents.blogspot.com/2007/02/one-law-for-us-another-for-you.html which BTW is very interesting commentary, and before that I heard it or similar somewhere (Will Rogers?) Say, if you’re into this stuff, what do you think of these issues?
This doesn’t appear to be the case. There is no need to assume that there is any such thing as wave function collapse. If we leave that out of the theory, the appearance of collapse arises naturally from the other axioms. It comes in when you pay close attention to how the environment acts with the particles in question. By including these interactions, we find a thermodynamic effect that mucks with the phase of various parts of the same wave function, preventing coherent interference. Once a wave function has so decohered, it can never interact with itself again. To an observer which is represented by any piece of the wave function that has decohered, it will appear as if the other pieces of the wave function don’t exist at all. This is known as quantum decoherence.
Since there is no need to assume that there is any such thing as wave function collapse, then, Occam’s Razor tells us we should reject it.
Jason, go and read and understand my critiques of the decoherence scam elsewhere on these threads (compare to what I just said about the equally wooly “multiple worlds” racket.) Specific localizations are what we actually observe, unless you are BSing us with that “illusion” and “appearing” conceit which violates all classic standards of empirical frankness. A wave which doesn’t collapse is just a wave, period, forever, not one or even a bunch of localizations (separated from each other by literally God only knows what – do you?) If they decohere, they would just forever stay “waves” which aren’t in the same relationship as before, unless you assume the consequences to begin with, that you were trying to prove. None of the mathematics of waves per se does or even *can* express or contain the localizations (since mathematical structures can’t produce true randomness, they are in effect “deterministic”! – so-called “random variables” are fiat entities of discourse about probabilities in general, not a genuine, formed machinery that can give us actual sequences.)
Collapses/localizations are a bizarre and logically absurd feature of the like-it-or-not *universe* we actually live in, for honest folk to acknowledge first and foremost even if *maybe* explainable in a sincere sense someday. Decoherence is a circular argument using the surreptitious putting in by hand of the very events it is presuming to explain.
Also, she read Tarot cards. Clearly, this is a woman who is witch-like and evil, and deserved to be punished.
You would not be so kind if she was, say, a church-goer.
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I wonder why nobody is prosecuting the lotery jackpot winners, for cheating – even if there is no evidence they actually fixed their winning. After all we know how infinitissimally small they winning odds were – so the possibility that they won by a chance is practically zero.
Feynman once pointed out this silly fallacy by saying: Right before this lecture I got into a taxi cab that had a this particular license plate. Isn’t it amazing that of all possible plates it was gonna be just this particular one? Now calculate the chances of this happenning by coincidence!
Neil B. wrote:
No. That’s the old-fashioned operationalist/instramentalist (Logical Positivism applied to physics) view of science. Science is not about predicting personal experiences, it is about finding patterns in nature. If the deepest pattern (i.e. that with the most explanatory power) conflicts with our common sense intuitions about reality, we need to discard our intuitions.
Logical Positivism and its ilk are moribund ideas (if they live at all) in that some of their fundamental postulates are problematic. For example, the axiom that “there is no reality beyond our sense experiences” has hard time explaining quantum computation, as the computations themselves cannot be observed — only the final output. The Logical Positivists axiom that “any statement that is not experimentally verifiable is meaningless” falls when applied to itself.
Belizean: Your critique of logical positivism is right on, since it fails its own test (but then what does it say about so many scientists and philosophers that they belived in it, and many still do (or at least, use it hypocritically as an anti-“woo” device of selective application only to the opposition?)
You misunderstood my point about empirical results. When I said “I” for an experiment, I didn’t mean, my personal subjective experiences as such, but the *public* results like the pattern of hits on a screen. That is “real” in any rational person’s world, and not something to be BSed off as “illusion” or whatever effete post-modern pretension. Of course that might conflict with “common sense” and down goes common sense, since I fully accept the bizarre world of quantum mechanical *results.* But if “results” conflict with “theories” then to hell with the theories. If you really think that I should even consider public results to be “illusions” and discarded in favor of what some vain theorists want to consider that things “ought” to be like (as do the hard-line multiple-worlds crackpots), then you’d be a crank (and I get the impression that you aren’t.)
PS: From Belize?
Neil,
I admit I don’t follow all the debates on the issue, since much of it is conjecture based on some intial assumptions that I feel to be wrong, but I do think some of these problems might be cleared up if we don’t try modeling time as a form of linear dimension.
Think for a moment about a thermodynamic medium, say a pot of hot water, with lots of water molecules moving about. It might be compared to a crowd of people moving about in a room. Now if one were to construct a time keeping device out of this situation, we might take the motion of one of these points of reference and measure it against the medium it is moving through. A more general model might take several of these measurements and average them out.
The point is the hand and the medium is the face of the clock. Obviously all the other points are hands of their own clocks, but are medium/face for all other clocks. As Newton pointed out, “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” So the motion of any point/hand is balanced by the reaction of the medium/face of the clock. To the hand of the clock, the face goes counterclockwise.
Now time is assumed to be a dimension because it only goes from past circumstances to future ones. As I’ve pointed out previously though, these circumstances go from being in the future to being in the past. Tomorrow, today will be yesterday. Going back to the thermodynamic medium, at any one moment, the positions of all these points constitute an event, so while any and all of them go from past events to future ones, the medium against which any point is being judged is the overall context, which once created, is displaced by the next, as all these individual points move around.
So the illusion of dimension is created because the physical reality of the points moves one way through the series of circumstances, but they are created by motion, rather then the basis for it, so to the extent time is a dimension of events, they go from future to past.
Now put this in the context of the collapsing wave paradigm; Because it is assumed time is a fundamental dimension, it is modeled as a wave of potentialities that collapses into actual circumstance. So how do we tie this one dimension to the whole range of interaction occuring simultaniously? We model it as a series of collapsing events in a linear narrative, Say the quantum event, the bottle of poison, the cat, the box, our eyes. This narrative is simply the stream of specific detail, much like a particular molecule traveling through the larger medium and the series of encounters involved. Yet, as I pointed out in that description, there are innumerable other points of reference also describing their own narrative and all this activity exists in an equilibrium, so there are waves of all these other narratives crashing around and nothing really collapses to a point, just continues on its merry way, because every narrative amounts to its own particular dimension, going its own particular way and there is no one dimension of time.
I’ll leave it at this and see if it makes any sense to you….
John,
We’ve had this discussion before, but there remains a fundamental flaw in your analysis. You assume that the appearance of time as a dimension is a result of interactions. The problem with this assumption is that time is treated as a dimension in the field equations which govern the interactions themselves.
Now, there may yet be interactions which we do not yet know how to describe which produce space-time as an emergent property. But time is not an emergent property of the physical laws that we know so far: that time is a dimension is, instead, an assumption that goes into the equations to begin with.
Jason,
Yes, I’m perfectly aware that “time is treated as a dimension in the field equations which govern the interactions themselves.”
As I’ve pointed out, the equations are a model of reality, not an ideal form of it, even if some people(re; Max Tegmark) think they are. They don’t govern anything, they attempt to describe it and given that the two main models don’t even fit together, they obviously don’t do a complete job of that. As I keep pointing out, I think that treating time as one dimension is a major flaw in the equations.
You are exactly right; “that time is a dimension is, instead, an assumption that goes into the equations to begin with.” Time as a dimension is an assumption. As I pointed out in my more detailed effort to present my observation, it isn’t just one dimension, but every clock and every potential clock is its own dimension. The reason they work together is that similar effects yield similar results and nearly identical effects yield nearly identical results.
I realize you are not about to question your own faith in the equations, as it is likely bound to your basic sense of identity, but realize you have to give me some reason to further question my own point, beyond saying that it is just not the way it’s done.
Yes, but your objections to this are rather meaningless. You keep ignoring that it’s not time per se, but space-time. This is how reality actually behaves: like space and time are not two fundamentally separate things, but rather different aspects of the same thing. This isn’t faith, it’s a fundamental aspect of Einsteinian relativity, the reality of which has been confirmed again and again in experiment after experiment.
As I have already stated, it is possible that this is due to the collective action of some interactions we have not yet described, but it is [i]not[/i] possible that it is due to the collective action of interactions which we already know how to properly describe. It is because you are focusing on the action of particles whose behavior we already know how to accurately describe, and because you aren’t considering space to be on the same footing as time, that I state that your objections are bunk.
Jason,
We can describe things in many ways and all of it generally requires the projection of time, but the simple fact is that past and future do not physically exist. That is because what physically exists is the matter and energy in its current state, not all past and potential ones. Space is like a noun; it is. Time is like a verb; it does. A verb is not a noun. You can’t have your cake and eat it to. You can’t have both position and momentum.
There are a lot of things that can be proven by repeated observation and experiment that may not be completely true, because all aspects haven’t been taken into account. It has been my personal experience that every day of my life, the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Because it repeats with such regularity I can even do other experiments based on it, such as giving an approximate time of day, or being able to determine what direction I’m facing. Does that all prove that it is the sun moving, or am I missing something?