User talk:Art LaPella/Devil's Dictionary of Wikipedia Policy
Original research
edit| This long discussion is mostly about original research, not my Devil's Dictionary. |
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==Hi! I really like your definition of NPOV and want to comment for a reason. There are or maybe only used to be people who liked to read and in doing so came into contact with people like Dr, Isaac Asimov who thought and said that if you read and think (synthesize ideas), and that some of those ideas might be worthy of further discussion. He then proceeded to throw out and sell Science Fiction ideas for a while and then change to science ideas because the pay was better, and in the process he evidently brainwashed a lot of young minds into a "dilusion of adequacy" related to their ability to understand the purported ideas of really intelligent people. So weve got these information hungry people running around looking for an explanation of everything and your involved in the process of explaining everything in terms of what a cosensus of people think about it. And if the subject matter were intellectual that sounds like a reasonable idea. But the subject matter is the factual history and future of science and physical reality and what is needed is a maximum effort to accurately determine things and events and avoid things like mathematical absurdities and paradoxes And I compliment you for trying to manage human nature in this process. But I think that a modified Boolean logic computer program might be the way to go. I note that Newton's analysis of the motion of the moon didn't say he couldn't figure it out. He merely said that he was unable to handle all the variables. WFPMWFPM (talk) 21:13, 13 October 2008 (UTC)
===I think that what I am doing, in a very unorganized human manner, of course, is admiring the growth process of the ability of computer programming science to analyze and make intelligent decisions about diverse subject matters in spite of the relative simplicity of their rules and decision making processes. And I notice that they are not peer pressure driven and the idea is king. And their ability to list and maintain control of the related supoposedly factual information; plus even quantified speculation about the correctness thereof appeals to me. And No is still No in Computerese. Not the ststistical possibilities of "tunneling", or the possibility of the tail end of a distribution curve, Which I consider to be human ideas discussed in at least an intelligent manner. But they dont have "intuition", which I also admire and whioh the rules wont permit them to have. I remember the computer problem of generating a random number where you do want the computer to generate a truly random number (for the pi approximation program), but for debugging purposes you wanted the computer to allways generate the same random number. That took a lot of computer programming effort and my little Casio cant do it. So when we get into discussions about the relative correctness (dubious criteria) about real things I have a tendency to think "What would a computer program do if it were in my decision predicament". WFPMWFPM (talk) 07:39, 14 October 2008 (UTC) ===Your last discussion about cosmology is illuminating. You say that cosmologists use computers for limited purposes. what you mean is that Cosmologists tell the computers "I make up the rules and you do the calculating!" And dont you start suggesting that it might be simpler (for programming purposes) if we merely start with a large volume of diffuse energy and then wait till all comes together in the center and see what happens and then wonder why it isn't back at a new diffuse condition at time T=2T. Or if the fact that the atomic mass particles are divided into two oposite spin categories has anything to do with anything. In other words dont think and just do your job amd calculate. WFPMWFPM (talk) 08:54, 14 October 2008 (UTC) === Oh yes and then the Mathemeticians come along and say, "I dont have time right now to think about more scientific problems, but I'm being paid to think about mathematics and I've got this problem of determining the smallest Skewes number and/or maybe winning $100,000 for finding a bigger Mersenne prime number, so I want you to spend your spare time doing these repetitive calculations and dont you break down or wear out. So I keep wondering as to the overall program management as to who is running the show about finding out about things. WFPMWFPM (talk) 15:20, 14 October 2008 (UTC) === And finally, as a person who owns etf funds and has read your QOL article, I think that your analysis of risk assessment discusses the subject matter well as to most details, maybe better than in science, but leaves out the "distributed risks" value factor as well as the merits/demerits of decision making based upon consensus decisions. See, I can obfuscate too. But I'm trying, and your trying, and let's hope for the best. WFPMWFPM (talk) 19:54, 14 October 2008 (UTC)
OK, you want me to specify a physical condition at T=zero. Nobody knows, but if you give me a moment of prayer, I'll ask. More seriously, I think you want me to specify some of the usual guesses, which you understand better that I do. Like an infinite mass at a point. Or a quantum fluctuation the size of a basketball before the measuring sticks shrink. Or something like that. Then you want to write a program that determines what would happen next. But what laws of nature would that program use for something infinite, or almost infinite? It seems likely that just as (I think) Maxwell's laws apply only to charged particles, there could easily be laws of nature that only apply to infinite or near-infinite density. The metaphor I've used before is that we're like artificially intelligent chess programs for whom a chess game is the entire known universe. We might argue that the chess game couldn't have a beginning because no legal chess move puts pieces on the board. So whatever laws of nature you want to use in your program, I don't believe them. But let's pretend I did believe them. I think your next step would be to show that the simulation wouldn't evolve into the modern universe. Then what? Do we ask Wikipedia to print our original research? That would be more impossible than getting some scientific journal to print it. Art LaPella (talk) 20:42, 15 October 2008 (UTC)
"My initial spherical volume concept had a diameter of 10E4 Megaparsecs ... " but you don't understand it better? Sorry, I don't have an initial spherical volume concept, although I suppose I could have been a cosmologist if I had made different choices. If your point is that the Big Bang article should be explained more simply, I think most every article should be explained more simply – see the "Encyclopedic" entry for instance in my Devil's Dictionary. The scientists wouldn't cooperate, but perhaps you would prefer Simple:Big Bang. My point about chess is that its setup goes by completely different rules than the rest of the game, so I don't see what the size of the game tree has to do with it. My analogy is that conservation of mass/energy, for instance, is like the rule that you can only move one piece per turn (except castling) - that rule doesn't apply to setting up the board, and similarly we can't be sure that mass/energy was conserved at t=0 (if there even was a t=0). Art LaPella (talk) 23:48, 15 October 2008 (UTC)
I agree that things like transfinite numbers aren't useful. That's why in 1973 I gave up my studies for a PhD in pure mathematics, and studied for a relatively ordinary job in computer programming. Cosmology isn't too useful either because we need space travel first; it doesn't really matter what's in the Whirlpool Galaxy if we can't go there. Is Marshfield, Missouri a coincidence, or is it a Sign from Above? Unless I get an announcement from an angel chorus, there are others who are much more qualified than I, to determine if you are the next Edwin Hubble. Art LaPella (talk) 05:02, 16 October 2008 (UTC)
I volunteered on a local space research project once, and wrote something that all kinds of people seemed to know about but nobody wanted to talk about. My Devil's Dictionary should give you a clue what it was like. My space fantasies are more capitalist – for more details see Milton Friedman and/or compare NASA's lack of progress since 1969 to the progress of free enterprise computers since then. And if I could just add another order of magnitude to my fortune I could get serious about commercial launching or something. As for your cosmology, once again, have I made it plain enough yet that there are blogs and such where such a proposal would be appropriate, and Wikipedia isn't one of them? If you didn't know about Simple:Big Bang perhaps you didn't know about Simple English Wikipedia; Simple:Main Page is a good place to start. It's made for foreigners or kids who don't know English very well, although in my experience a kid who is old enough to research using Wikipedia is old enough to need more information than Simple English Wikipedia contains so far. Art LaPella (talk) 22:03, 16 October 2008 (UTC)
Sounds like WFF 'N PROOF. That has an article because it's a commercial success, but it's actually a thinly veiled repackaging of a symbolic logic class. Hex (board game) is probably better known as a mathematical plaything than as a commercial board game, and it has an article. If it's possible to deliberately set out to get enough publicity to get onto Wikipedia that way, it would have to be a career, not a hobby, and I haven't heard of anyone doing it (certainly not an introvert like me; for one thing I don't have "cohorts", and for another I have given up on writing new articles – even my additions to ex-dividend date have been removed by people who don't seem to understand some details I do.) Removing original research is a routine pain that goes with Wikipedia, along with removing vandalism, advertising and creationism, although no supplier of original research considers his historic breakthrough to be routine. Anyway, I'm not the guy you need to convince, because I usually let others decide if something has enough references. Art LaPella (talk) 07:26, 17 October 2008 (UTC) ==Well hello fellow introvert, except that I'm married with 4 progeny which kind of shook me out of that. I guess I've just run into someone who really isn't interested in science, as is the majority. But I dont see how you could want to become a genious in mathematics without being interested in something you could do with that knowledge. My mother told me that if I became an Injuneer I could probably always find a job and there were hard times in those days. But I guess I'm a just a frustrated scientist who doesn't know how to make a living at that. But I'm not trying to get personal publicity. I'm trying to get a system of logical discussion of scientific ideas based on (technical merit?) or something like that but not peer pressure. I think that maybe Philosophy is the study of ideas (abstractions) and Science is the study about ideas about real physical entities. And when I see or hear some "Scientist?) talking about something that isn't real I have my doubts about his MO. Like a discussion about whether something can be a "point source" of something real. But If John Dalton got away with it maybe I can to. WFPMWFPM (talk) 13:31, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
==When I was a child and my mother used to take jme along on red cross drives, she used to quote a poem question to people as maaybe a way to make conversation. Anyhow the poem was " If a third of six were three, what would a fourth of twenty be? And I still don't know the answer to that question. Is there an answer? WFPMWFPM (talk) 02:14, 18 October 2008 (UTC)
Sounds something like Mathematical model#Philosophical considerations. The price of a security is a measure of the current consensus. So you can't rely on that same consensus to determine if that price is going up or down, as such an expectation is already included in the current price. People who claim to tell you what's going up and what's going down are usually lying – if such knowledge were so easily available, billionaires would have hired someone to have already acted on that information, and taken the profit out of it because they would keep buying or selling until that drives the price up or down to its predicted level. I think BWC is more likely to go up than down in the next few weeks, simply because its discount from its net asset value is bigger (that is, more negative) than normal. But as a long term investment I have no idea because I'm a trader, not an investment advisor, and I don't trust investment advisors anyway except to tell you the basics like Suze Orman – buy and hold, diversify and don't feed the stock brokers and pump and dumpers. Art LaPella (talk) 18:58, 19 October 2008 (UTC)
I undid it (you used semicolons instead of colons). Your most relevant comment there was "I like it because it promotes the idea of the existence of a hierarchy of things", and the least relevant one was changing the Relevance? section, which is a joke, into a speech. Art LaPella (talk) 22:23, 19 October 2008 (UTC)
As long as we can't really go there, it's only science. Art LaPella (talk) 23:48, 19 October 2008 (UTC) |
Art LaPella for president!
editGreat page - the amusing parts are true, the true parts are amusing, and none of it's boring. -- Philcha (talk) 23:57, 29 October 2008 (UTC)
- Thank you! Art LaPella (talk) 01:09, 30 October 2008 (UTC)
Fringe theories
editRe "The most dangerous pseudoscience is promoted by academia, especially in the so-called "social sciences"", you might like to consider the Sokal affair. --Philcha (talk) 23:14, 27 November 2008 (UTC)
- Thank you, I used it. Art LaPella (talk) 01:39, 28 November 2008 (UTC)
Still holds true
editThe fact I only just came across this and that it still holds true in 2024 shows that this is a brilliant piece of work! Well done. Nford24 (PE121 Personnel Request Form) 06:29, 8 February 2024 (UTC)