khafra comments on The Irrationality Game - Less Wrong

38 Post author: Will_Newsome 03 October 2010 02:43AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 28 October 2010 05:00:36AM * 51 points [-]

The surface of Earth is actually a relatively flat disc accelerating through space "upward" at a rate of 9.8 m/s^2, not a globe. The north pole is at about the center of the disc, while Antarctica is the "pizza crust" on the outside. The rest of the universe is moving and accelerating such that all the observations seen today by amateur astronomers are produced. The true nature of the sun, moon, stars, other planets, etc. is not yet well-understood by science. A conspiracy involving NASA and other space agencies, all astronauts, and probably at least some professional astronomers is a necessary element. I'm pretty confident this isn't true, much more due to the conspiracy element than the astronomy element, but I don't immediately dismiss it where I imagine most LW-ers would, so let's say 1%.

The Flat Earth Society has more on this, if you're interested. It would probably benefit from a typical, interested LW participant. (This belief isn't the FES orthodoxy, but it's heavily based on a spate of discussion I had on the FES forums several years ago.)

Edit: On reflection, 1% is too high. Instead, let's say "Just the barest inkling more plausible than something immediately and rigorously disprovable with household items and a free rainy afternoon."

Comment author: Jack 31 October 2010 09:13:17AM 10 points [-]

Even with the 1% credence this strikes me as the most wrong belief in this thread, way more off than 95% for UFOs. You're basically giving up science since Copernicus, picking an arbitrary spot in the remaining probability space and positing a massive and unmotivated conspiracy. Like many, I'm uncomfortable making precise predictions at very high and very low levels of confidence but I think you are overconfident by many orders of magnitude.

Upvoted.

Comment author: [deleted] comment score below threshold [+] (14 children)

Comment author: Jack 31 October 2010 09:47:32PM 2 points [-]

One in a billion strikes me as too high. Rank ordering is easier for me. I'd put your hypothesis above the existence of the Biblical God but beneath the conjunction of "9/11 Attack was a plot organized by elements of the US government", "the Lock Ness monster is a living Plesiosaur", and "Homeopathy works".

Comment author: Psy-Kosh 12 December 2010 02:57:19PM * 1 point [-]

Huh. My initial thought would be to simply put it at about the same order of improbability as "homeopathy is real" rather than far below.

A quick surface consideration would seem to imply both requiring the same sort of "stuff we thought we know about the world is wrong, in a way that we'd strongly expect to make it look very different than it does, so in addition to that, it would need a whole lot of other tweaks to make it still look mostly the way it does look to us now".

(At least that's my initial instinctive thought. Didn't make the effort to try to actually compute specific probabilities yet.)

Comment author: Jack 13 December 2010 07:49:34AM * 4 points [-]

Like homeopathy it is a belief that well-confirmed scientific theories are wrong. But more so than homeopathy it specifies a scenario within that probability space (the earth is an accelerating disk, and specifies a scenario for why the information we have is wrong [the conspiracy]). I also think the disk-earth scenario requires more fundamental and better confirmed theories to be wrong than homeopathy does. It calls into question gravitation, Newtonian physics, thermodynamics and geometry.

I may be overconfident regarding homeopathy, though. The disk-earth scenario might seem more improbable because it is bigger and would do more to shatter my conception of my place in the universe than memory water would. Would we have to topple all of science to acknowledge homeopathy? Thats my sense of what we would have to do for the disk-earth thing.

Comment author: Psy-Kosh 14 December 2010 05:57:03AM 1 point [-]

I was thinking homeopathy would essentially throw out much of what we think we know about chemistry. For the world to still look like it does even with the whole "you can dilute something to the point that there's hardly a molecule of the substance in question, but it can impose its energy signature onto the water molecules", etc, well... for that sort of thing to have a biological effect as far as being able to treat stuff, but not having any effect like throwing everything else about chemistry and bio out of whack would seem to be quite a stretch. Not to mention that, underneath all that, would probably require physics to work rather differently than the physics we know. And in noticeable ways rather than zillionth decimal place ways.

Possibly you're right, and it would be less of a stretch than flat-earth, but doesn't seem that way at least. Specifying the additional specific of a nasa conspiracy being the source of the flat earth being hidden may be sufficient additional complexity to drive it below homeopathy. But overall, I'd think of both as requiring similar order of magnitude improbabilities.

Comment author: Jack 15 December 2010 03:45:03PM 1 point [-]

But can't homeopathy be represented as positing an additional chemical law- the presence of some spiritual energy signature which water can carry? I'm not exactly familiar with homeopathy but it seems like you could come up with a really kludgey theory that lets it work without you actually having to get rid of theories of chemical bonding, valence electrons and so on. It doesn't seem as easy to do that with the disk earth scenario.

Comment author: Desrtopa 15 December 2010 04:40:03PM * 3 points [-]

It's worse than that. Water having a memory, spiritual or otherwise, of things it used to carry, would be downright simple compared to what homeopathy posits. Considering everything all the water on Earth has been through, you'd expect it to be full of memories of all sorts of stuff; not just the last homeopathic remedy you put in it. What homeopathy requires is that water has a memory of things that it has held, which has to be primed by a specific procedure, namely thumping the container of water against a leather pad stuffed with horse hair while the solute is still in it so the water will remember it. The process is called "succussion" and the inventor of homeopathy thought that it made his remedies stronger. Later advocates though, realized the implications of the "water has a memory" hypothesis, and so rationalized it as necessary.

Comment author: Psy-Kosh 15 December 2010 06:53:37PM 1 point [-]

Wow. I hadn't even heard of the very specific leather pad thing. (I've heard it has to be shaken in specific ways, but not that)

How is it that no matter how stupid I think it is, I keep hearing things that makes homeopathy even more stupid than I previously thought?

Comment author: Psy-Kosh 15 December 2010 06:46:05PM 0 points [-]

What Desertopa said.

But essentially whatever kludge you come up with would still have to have biochemical consequences or it wouldn't be able to work at all. (Or you make the kludge super extra complex, which then, again, crushes the probability). And once you have those effects, you need an excuse for why those effects don't show up elsewhere in chemistry, why we don't see such things otherwise.

Comment author: Jack 15 December 2010 04:13:22PM 0 points [-]

Quoting myself:

It calls into question... geometry.

Am I right about this?- that we'd need a kind of radial geometry in order to explain say the distance around the Tropic of Cancer being apx. equal to the distance around the Tropic of Capricorn. Or, more blatantly, the similar distances around the Arctic and Antarctic circles. You'd have a have center point, and circles with that point as their vertex would get their circumference proportionally to their radius. Then, when the radius reached half a longitude the circumference would get proportionally smaller until the radius reaches a full longitude and the circle collapses to a point. On this Earth airplanes in the periphery of the disk trying to get to the exact other side of the disk would first fly the edge of the disk and in an instant fly 40,000 kilometers around side of the disk. Momentarily, of course, the plane would be 40,000 kilometers long. Once on the opposite side the plane would continue on to it's destination.

Comment author: komponisto 15 December 2010 06:29:57PM * 1 point [-]

If you accept measurements, it seems to me there's no way to save the flat-earth hypothesis except by supposing that our understanding of mathematics is wrong -- which seems rather less likely than measurements being wrong.

The most likely way that flat-earth could be true is that all the information we've been told about measurements (including, for example, the photos of the spherical earth) is a lie.

(Since you were fond of the Knox case discussion, I'll note that I have a similar view of the situation there: the most likely way that Knox and Sollecito could be guilty is that there is mundane but important information that has somehow never made it to the internet. In both cases, the most vulnerable beliefs underpinning the high-confidence conclusion are beliefs about the transmission of information among humans.)

Comment author: [deleted] 16 December 2010 01:29:19AM * 0 points [-]

The traditional response to this on the FES website is that airplanes aren't actually flying from one side of the disk to the other. They might go around the periphery to some extent, but outside the disk is probably either a lot of nothing or a very, very large, cold field of ice. So, that would make a trip from the Cape of Good Hope to Cape Horn take much, much longer than a spherical-ish Earth would predict.

That's why I assign such a low probability to this--that, and the motion of the stars in the Northern and Southern hemispheres working exactly the way they would if the Earth were approximately spherical. If this disk Earth were the case, the stars in the Southern hemisphere would be rotating in the same direction as the stars in the Northern hemisphere, just with a wider radius of rotation, and there would be no axis that the stars rotate about near the south pole; and though I haven't personally observed this effect, I'm pretty confident that astronomers would have noticed this. (This whole objection got explained away by different "star clouds" in different hemispheres.)

Well, that and the conspiracy.

My initial probability given was probably too low.

Comment author: David_Gerard 15 December 2010 05:07:26PM -1 points [-]

Would we have to topple all of science to acknowledge homeopathy?

Large chunks of it. You'd need to overturn pretty much all of chemistry and molecular biology, and I think physics would be severely affected too.

The reasons for homeopathy retaining popularity are in the realm of psychology.

Comment author: [deleted] 01 November 2010 12:04:58AM -1 points [-]

I agree, at least with the first and last examples of more-likely. 1% is probably too high.

How about "Just the barest inkling above not immediately dismissed" instead of a specific number.

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