Dark Matter

[Flannel_Jesus]

The reasons why I accept that all photons are identical:

It is overwhelmingly the consensus in the field.
I understand why there would be a detectable difference between a world in which its TRUE and one in which its FALSE. (phone is caps-locking TRUE and FALSE, not me)
I accept that we have done the appropriate experiments and discovered that we live in a world in which it is TRUE.

I did a search in my university online library. The number of articles which took “fundamentally indistinguishable particles” for granted was large. Whether you believe that they’re indistinguishable or not, it is the status quo.

[Fixed_Cross]

Jesus… I m sorry Flannel but I almost vomit reading that kind of stuff. I’m not exaggerating, it surprises even me how repulsed I am. Maybe it’s something to do with what I just ate but I don’t think so.

A few years ago, I had never imagined intelligent people could actually consider that a reason to believe something, at least not in the field of science.

So what you’re doing, if I am correct, in finding out if you’ll accept an idea, is to see if there are many people who take it for granted. Okay. If you’re a totally brainless kid without any aspirations to think I would accept this. But you, the moderator of a science forum - that is really bad.

But the part that makes me nauseous in the pit of my stomach is that you are being an arrogant and dismissive prick to people who actually have actually thought about the subject and spent years on developing actual explanations.

It makes me sick because it represents the new standard - scientific method now equals looking down on thought. I’ve heard phyllo and HHW say the same thing. “You’re an idiot for thinking about this, everyone knows that you have to read the peer review magazines to learn about the truth.”

RIP Science. We are back at Talmud-study.

[James_S_Saint]

@Flannel Jesus

The reasons why I accept that all photons are identical:

It is overwhelmingly the consensus in the field.

Show me that poll.

@Flannel Jesus

I understand why there would be a detectable difference between a world in which its TRUE and one in which its FALSE.

I’m not seeing any understanding coming out of you. You just say “They say, thus it MUST be true!”

@Flannel Jesus

I accept that we have done the appropriate experiments and discovered that we live in a world in which it is TRUE.

I don’t think that you even know what you just said. And no telling what you meant by it.

@Flannel Jesus

I did a search in my university online library. The number of articles which took “fundamentally indistinguishable particles” for granted was large. Whether you believe that they’re indistinguishable or not, it is the status quo.

Oh well, all hail “the status quo”.

QM cannot ever prove anything about individual anything because QM is entirely about statistical outcomes. They could not examine a single photon to see if it was identical to another if their life depended on it. And if you think otherwise, just explain exactly how they do that.

[Fixed_Cross]

QM cannot ever prove anything about individual anything because QM is entirely about statistical outcomes. They could not examine a single photon to see if it was identical to another if their life depended on it. And if you think otherwise, just explain exactly how they do that.

It looks very much like that is why photons would have to be interpreted as identical.
Not because they’re observed to be identical, but because they are required to be identical to fit the definition that allows for convenient calculations.

Such circular definitions seem to be the rule these days.
We can say that x = y if we decide that only x’s that are y are x.

[Flannel_Jesus]

[quote=“Fixed Cross”]
So what you’re doing, if I am correct, in finding out if you’ll accept an idea, is to see if there are many people who take it for granted. Okay. If you’re a totally brainless kid without any aspirations to think I would accept this. But you, the moderator of a science forum - that is really bad.[/img]
It’s actually not. It’s actually pretty acceptable. It’s the entire reason science exists in the first place.

With some caveats, of course.

It’s not just, ‘see if there are many people.’ It’s not just any group of people that I’m looking at. If it were just any group of people, I’d be a theist!

It’s a select group of people who follow certain methodologies which have been developed to weed out mistakes more efficiently than any other paradigm in that domain. It’s also a select group of people who have to do many, many very difficult things that signal competence and intelligence in various areas.

Now, out of this select group of people, if there’s some idea which is sort of being tossed around, but very few people actually properly believe it, then I probably won’t believe it – at least not without studying it first.

But I’m not talking about an idea just being tossed around. I’m talking about an idea that is unanimously accepted by people who are experts in the field, and the only place I’ve seen it contradicted is here, by non-experts. This is not just a frivolous idea that I’m talking about – this is unanimously accepted by just about the only people who have any claim to saying ‘I know what I’m talking about’ in this field.

Now, if what I’m doing is accepting what a whole lot of brilliant experts said, and that’s ‘bad’, then…what do you think you’re doing? Accepting that it’s false because some dude on the internet said so? Or simply because it doesn’t fit in with your intuition?

What scientists think is evidence. If that makes you vomit, then I’m sorry your weak stomach can’t handle reality. If what scientists say isn’t evidence, then every single paper that’s ever been published might as well just be burned, right? What other scientists say doesn’t count, you have to learn everything yourself from scratch, their papers are just as likely to be outright lies as they are to hold any truth so just burn them all.

I don’t agree with that. I think that what someone thinks is evidence, and what an expert thinks is even better evidence, and what the entire field of experts thinks is even better evidence yet. Not ‘proof’ of course – it’s not a subtle distinction, the difference between ‘proof’ and ‘evidence’, but a lot of people on this forum can’t tell the difference, so I feel the need to specify that. And of course the degree that it’s evidence depends on the field in question, on the idea in question, on the degree of agreement in the field, and various other factors.

So yes, what scientists think is true is evidence. And this idea is perfectly in line with the philosophy of science. And if that makes you vomit, then maybe science isn’t for you.

[Flannel_Jesus]

sqig.math.ist.utl.pt/pub/Paunkov … thesis.pdf

[phyllo]

So yes, what scientists think is true is evidence.

No it isn’t. What scientists observe …is evidence. What scientists think …is expert opinion, analysis, interpretation, diagnosis.

Look at a simple example. A doctor thinks you have strep throat.
That thought is not evidence of strep. The evidence is the visual examination of your throat, body temperature , a swab sample test, etc.

[James_S_Saint]

FJ, you just confessed to being entirely religious, “If the Vatican believes it then I believe it”. You just think that you have the better religion, “The Holy Order of Quantum Scientism”.

And Science did NOT begin by anyone accepting what any other group said. That is exactly what religion is. Science is the exact opposite. Science is Nullius in Verba, “Take no ones word”, the motto of the Royal Society for the Advancement of Science. It’s method was intended to be “open demonstration”, not “public obfuscation”. You and PhysBang are anti-science fundamentalists.

If you can’t explain it yourself, it’s because you don’t know it yourself.

And for any two photons to be perfectly identical, their wavelength would have to be perfectly identical. You can’t produce absolute perfection even in a lab. And certainly not billions of times in order to get a sample.

And on top of all of that is the simple fact that the plebs preaching this stuff are conflating “indistinguishability” with “perfectly identical”. Those are NOT the same thing or at least not in QM. The reason people have it confused is because these PhD quack quantum physics phanaticisers don’t know the difference between indistinguishability and indiscernability.

Their point is simply that you can’t draw a line around a single particle due to their need to be able to superimpose affects from other particles in order to claim the existence of any one particle, hence one cannot discern one particle from another.

“Quantum Blindness”.
The entire group of them as a whole are blind… leading those who cannot see.

[Flannel_Jesus]

@phyllo

So yes, what scientists think is true is evidence.

No it isn’t. What scientists observe …is evidence. What scientists think …is expert opinion, analysis, interpretation, diagnosis.

Look at a simple example. A doctor thinks you have strep throat.
That thought is not evidence of strep. The evidence is the visual examination of your throat, body temperature , a swab sample test, etc.

There is a mathematical definition of evidence. It involves a lot of symbols, but its fairly simple to put into plain English. There is an idea, I. You think that idea has a particular probability of being TRUE, p(I). There are possible observaions which increase p(I) and others which decrease it, and others which don’t change it at all. Those which increase it, we call ‘evidence for I’.

Strep throat:
Say I have a sore throat. Lets say that im not very medically knowledgable, I think 50% likely I have a cold, 10% likely I have strep and 40% likely something else (forgive bad grammar, on phone)

If I see a doctor and he examines me and tells me I have strep, my probability estimate for strep is going to shoot way up, from 10% to at least 90%. And if your probability estimate doesn’t change, you might as well not listen to the doctor at all. When a doctor tells you you have some condition, and it doesn’t change your probability estimates at least marginally, then…doctors saying things is completely useless.

I think that your probability estimates do change in practice, you just are not yet willing to call it ‘evidence’

[James_S_Saint]

You merely confirmed what phyllo said.

[Flannel_Jesus]

The alternative to thinking that what a doctor says is evidence is thinking that what a doctor says is uncorrelated or even negatively correlated with the actual state you’re in. In other words, to say ‘what a doctor says you have is not evidence’ has a very specific meaning: that they will not perform better than a random number generator.

I think doctors perform better than random number generators. I know there are those here who don’t. Do you?

[James_S_Saint]

It has been my observation that even pseudo-random number generators are more reliable than doctors and scientists.

Scientists are not what I classify as “thinkers”. They are technicians who don’t know what it is that they don’t know, like a car mechanic trying to design an engine. Or like a Quantum Physicist.

[phyllo]

Say I have a sore throat. Lets say that im not very medically knowledgable, I think 50% likely I have a cold, 10% likely I have strep and 40% likely something else (forgive bad grammar, on phone)

If I see a doctor and he examines me and tells me I have strep, my probability estimate for strep is going to shoot way up, from 10% to at least 90%. And if your probability estimate doesn’t change, you might as well not listen to the doctor at all. When a doctor tells you you have some condition, and it doesn’t change your probability estimates at least marginally, then…doctors saying things is completely useless.

I think that your probability estimates do change in practice, you just are not yet willing to call it ‘evidence’

Say I have read the holy books. I think it is 50% likely that Jesus is my savior, 10% that God doesn’t even exist and 40% likely that some other stuff is correct.
I go see a priest, he answers my questions and tells me that Jesus is my savior. My probability estimate for Jesus being my savior shoots way up to at least 90%. Jesus is Lord. Amen.

[James_S_Saint]

Probabilities will keep you blind forever.
It’s the possibilities that allows one to see forever.

But it helps to know how to tell one from the other.

[phyllo]

The alternative to thinking that what a doctor says is evidence is thinking that what a doctor says is uncorrelated or even negatively correlated with the actual state you’re in. In other words, to say ‘what a doctor says you have is not evidence’ has a very specific meaning: that they will not perform better than a random number generator.

The alternative is to say that a doctor is expert at gathering and interpreting a specific type of evidence.

[Flannel_Jesus]

That’s not an alternative. That’s a completely compatible statement – in fact, that’s the reason you take what the doctor says as evidence.

[phyllo]

You’re conflating ‘evidence’ and ‘expert opinion’.

That leads to many absurd situations.
Cops who think a suspect is guilty then become ‘evidence’ for his guilt.
Physicists who think a many-worlds interpretation is correct, are ‘evidence’ for many-worlds.

It’s easy to think of many examples.

[Flannel_Jesus]

@phyllo

Say I have read the holy books. I think it is 50% likely that Jesus is my savior, 10% that God doesn’t even exist and 40% likely that some other stuff is correct.
I go see a priest, he answers my questions and tells me that Jesus is my savior. My probability estimate for Jesus being my savior shoots way up to at least 90%. Jesus is Lord. Amen.

I’m sure it’s amusing to you to just throw numbers around, but these numbers have meaning. And in this case, the meaning doesn’t correspond to a very sensible mind.

When a probability shoots way up, that means something.
p(J) = .5, right?
You make an observation - you observe that your priest tells you Jesus is your savior. Let’s call this observation P

In order for p(J) to shoot way up, p(P|J) must be SIGNIFICANTLY higher than p(P|¬J).
In other words, the priest has to be much much much more likely to tell you Jesus is your savior in a world in which Jesus is your savior, than in a world in which Jesus isn’t your savior.

Now, before you even see the priest, there’s a probability that he’ll tell you that Jesus is your savior, p(P). IF you believe that p(J) = .5, and IF you believe p(P|J) > p(P|¬J) by a significant amount (ie, enough to actually surprise you and change your beliefs significantly), then you’d actually have to believe that p(P) is pretty low to begin with - I’m not going to do the math, but somewhere around .5.

And what kind of prior is that? Not a sensible one. It’s a prior which expliticly states, ‘There’s only a 30-60% chance that a priest will tell people that Jesus is their savior.’

Such a person would have to have lived under a rock to have such a prior. All priests say ‘Jesus is your savior’. p(P) = 1 - epsilon, not .5.

On the contrary, in my example, where I update my belief on Strep when the doctor tells me I have Strep, again, the implication is that he must be much more likely to tell me I have strep in a world in which I do have strep, than in a world in which I don’t have strep. Do you think doctors are much more likely to tell people that they have strep when they actually have strep? I do.

[Flannel_Jesus]

@phyllo

You’re conflating ‘evidence’ and ‘expert opinion’.

That leads to many absurd situations.
Cops who think a suspect is guilty then become ‘evidence’ for his guilt.
Physicists who think a many-worlds interpretation is correct, are ‘evidence’ for many-worlds.

It’s easy to think of many examples.

Evidence, as I said, has a specific mathematical definition. If you update your probabilities after the doctor tells you what he thinks you have, then you’re treating what the doctor says as evidence.

[phyllo]

Do you think doctors are much more likely to tell people that they have strep when they actually have strep? I do.

What the doctor tells you is not the evidence.

You seem to have become so caught up with probability and statistics that you believe that these mathematical models are reality. Try stepping back and reasoning this out without the math.