I'm going to be a bit serious here with you guys. I'm BS in Physics, so what I am going to say isn't going to make you happy, but it will make you smarter.
There are lots and lots of patterns and such you can find in nature, and oftentimes, when you see a pattern, it is either due to the instrument making the measurement or the fact that there is something in nature going on to create that pattern. Just because you've found a pattern doesn't mean you understand what happened.
I haven't been commenting much on the math posts, even though I am probably more qualified than 99% of the people here to do so. The reason why is that you can't jump to conclusions.
Case in point: Back a little while after they had definitive proof of the Higg's Boson, there was a lot of excitement about a bump they found in the data. Statistically, it was not significant -- too little data. It could've been the equivalent of rolling 5 6's in a row on a dice. That said, a ton of ink and a ton of brainpower was spent trying to explain it. It was the topic de jour in the physics community for a good six months or more.
When they were able to run additional experiments, what do you know? The bump disappeared. All of those papers and theories -- GARBAGE.
I don't trust math. I have been fooled too many times by it. If someone shows me a graph my response is always, "Oh, that's nice. What sort of propaganda did you create in Excel today?" I've listened to tons of business pitches -- I work in the startup community. I've heard it all, and watched them all crash and burn when it turns out their little theory was nonsense. Most recently, I worked with tens of thousands of machines for a major software company you all have heard of doing image recognition and voice recognition. All that hardware, all those billions of dollars wasted, all to find out that we really can't make things much better than they are.
Math is fun, math is great, but at the end of the day, it is a game invented by bored smart people to entertain themselves. Where the rubber hits the road is in EXPERIMENTS. That's why I studied Physics and not math.
Now, when it comes to this election, we have 3 fights we need to win: 1 at the ballot box, 1 in the courtrooms, and 1 in the sphere of public opinion. Math away if it will help you in one or more of those arenas. But if you were to ask me to give my professional opinion on some of these theories, you wouldn't like what I would say. I certainly don't want to do the democrat's job for them (they are bad at math, by the way. REALLY bad at math.)
I'm going to be a bit serious here with you guys. I'm BS in Physics, so what I am going to say isn't going to make you happy, but it will make you smarter.
There are lots and lots of patterns and such you can find in nature, and oftentimes, when you see a pattern, it is either due to the instrument making the measurement or the fact that there is something in nature going on to create that pattern. Just because you've found a pattern doesn't mean you understand what happened.
I haven't been commenting much on the math posts, even though I am probably more qualified than 99% of the people here to do so. The reason why is that you can't jump to conclusions.
Case in point: Back a little while after they had definitive proof of the Higg's Boson, there was a lot of excitement about a bump they found in the data. Statistically, it was not significant -- too little data. It could've been the equivalent of rolling 5 6's in a row on a dice. That said, a ton of ink and a ton of brainpower was spent trying to explain it. It was the topic de jour in the physics community for a good six months or more.
When they were able to run additional experiments, what do you know? The bump disappeared. All of those papers and theories -- GARBAGE.
I don't trust math. I have been fooled too many times by it. If someone shows me a graph my response is always, "Oh, that's nice. What sort of propaganda did you create in Excel today?" I've listened to tons of business pitches -- I work in the startup community. I've heard it all, and watched them all crash and burn when it turns out their little theory was nonsense. Most recently, I worked with tens of thousands of machines for a major software company you all have heard of doing image recognition and voice recognition. All that hardware, all those billions of dollars wasted, all to find out that we really can't make things much better than they are.
Math is fun, math is great, but at the end of the day, it is a game invented by bored smart people to entertain themselves. Where the rubber hits the road is in EXPERIMENTS. That's why I studied Physics and not math.
Now, when it comes to this election, we have 3 fights we need to win: 1 at the ballot box, 1 in the courtrooms, and 1 in the sphere of public opinion. Math away if it will help you in one or more of those arenas. But if you were to ask me to give my professional opinion on some of these theories, you wouldn't like what I would say. I certainly don't want to do the democrat's job for them (they are bad at math, by the way. REALLY bad at math.)