Yes, the point is to be sure you aren't using "Emergence" or "Emergent Phenomena" as stop signs. That you recognize that there is in fact a cause (or causes) for what you are seeing, and if the total seems to be more than the sum of its parts, that there is some mechanism that exists that is amplifying the effects.

Emergence is not an explanation by itself.

The appellate system itself - of which cases involving new DNA evidence are a tiny fraction - is a much more useful measure.

There are a whole lot more exonerations via the appeals process than those driven by DNA evidence alone. This aught to be obvious, and the 0.2% provided by DNA is an extreme lower bound, not the actual rate of error correction.

Case in point, I found an article describing a study on overturning death penalty convictions, and they found that 7% of convictions were overturned on re-trial, and 75% of sentences were reduced from the death penalty upon re-trial.

One in fourteen sounds a lot more reasonable to me, and again that's just death penalty cases, for which you'd expect a higher than normal standard for conviction and sentencing.

The standard estimate is about 10% for the system as a whole.

The theory that you are familiar with is a little off. What stars can produce is solely a function of size, not generation. Already fused material from a previous star does not allow the new star to fuse more elements. Likewise, the longevity of stars is solely a function of size. It's a balance between the heat of fusion and the pressure of gravity. More matter in the star means more pressure, which means the rate of fusion increases and more elements can be fused, but the fuel is consumed significantly faster.

The smaller a star is the longer it burns, because there is less pressure being exerted by gravity to drive the fusion process. Big stars don't last long (the biggest only a few million years), but they produce the all of the naturally occurring elements - up to iron via normal fusion, and the heavier elements during supernova that occurs after iron fusion begins. Smaller stars like our sun will never get past the carbon stage and will never go supernova, and smaller stars still like brown dwarfs will never get past the hydrogen stage. These small stars last the longest because their rate of fusion is incredibly slow.

Interesting! I hadn't thought about quantum tunneling as a source of uncertainty (mainly because I don't understand it very well - my understanding of QM is very tenuous).

I'm not sure I understand how quantum events could have an appreciable effect on chemical reactions once decoherance has occurred. Could you point me somewhere with more information? It's very possible I misunderstood a sequence, especially the QM sequence.

I could also see giving different estimates for the population of Australia for slightly different versions of your brain, but I would think you would give different estimates given the same neuron configuration and starting conditions extremely rarely (that is, run the test a thousand times on molecule for molecule identical brains and you might answer it differently once, and I feel like that is being extremely generous).

Honestly I would think the decoherance would be so huge by the time you got up to the size of individual cells that it would be very difficult to get any meaningful uncertainty. That is to say, quantum events might be generating a constant stream of alternate universe brains, but for every brain that is functionally different from yours there would be trillions and trillions of brains that are functionally identical.

If you include electrons a single water molecule has 64 quarks, and many of the proteins and lipids our cells are made of have thousands of atoms per molecule and therefore tens of thousands of quarks. I am having a hard time envisioning anything less than hundreds of quarks in a molecule doing enough to change the way that molecule would have hooked into its target receptor, and further that another of the same molecule wouldn't have simply hooked into the receptor in its place and performed the identical function. There may be some slight differences in the way individual molecules work, but you would need hundreds to thousands of molecules doing something different to cause a single neuron to fire differently (and consequently millions of quarks), and I'm not sure a single neuron firing differently is necessarily enough for your estimate of Australia to change (though it would have a noticeable effect given enough time, a la the butterfly effect). The amount of decoherance here is just staggering.

To summarize what I'm saying, you'd need at least hundreds of quarks per molecule zigging instead of zagging in order for it to behave differently enough to have any meaningful effect and probably at least a few hundred molecules per neuron to alter when/how/if that neuron fires, or whether or not the next neuron's dendrite receives the chemical signal. I would think such a scenario would be extremely rare, even with the 100 billion or so neurons and 100 trillion or so synapses in the brain.

Do neurons operate at the quantum level? I thought they were large enough to have full decoherance throughout the brain, and thus no quantum uncertainty, meaning we could predict this particular version of your brain perfectly if we could account for the state and linkages of every neuron.

Or do neurons leverage quantum coherence in their operation?

Yeesh, that's terrible. It kind of figures that he'd rather mislead a class full of students about the way physics works than own up to his mistake.

It reminds me of an error I had been taught about the way airfoils work that wasn't corrected until I read a flippin comic strip on the subject almost a decade after I graduated high school.

I was stunned, and spent the rest of the afternoon learning how airfoils really work. What makes this particular example so tragic is it leverages another principle of physics that you won't realize doesn't fit if you are taught to accept everything the teacher says as gospel. What's worse is I'm pretty sure the mistake is still there in the vast majority of textbooks.

Ad hominem literally means "to the man" or "to the person".

It was most certainly an ad hominem question, but given the framing he probably wasn't intending to discredit the argument with the ad hominem and therefore didn't commit the ad hominem fallacy.

The fallacy is making an ad hominem attack in order to distract from or discredit the argument without addressing the merits of the argument itself. The traits can certainly be related to the argument, and in fact the more closely related the traits are the more effective the fallacy is at convincing others (e.g. He's wrong about QFT because he isn't a physicist vs he's wrong about QFT because he drinks milk - both fallacies, the first much more effective than the second). That doesn't mean the ad hominem isn't relevant nor worth discussing, it only means the ad hominem is not evidence against the argument. The fallacy lies in thinking that it is.

SORRY, idiots! (that's not a.h. either)

It's still ad hominem, it's just not a logical fallacy (but given that the word "idiot" means a person with extra-ordinarily low intelligence, it's almost certainly incorrect).

I will say that I also had a high school English teacher who would use the wrong word or give a ridiculous interpretation in the hopes that a student would correct him and learn to not always trust authority.

I had a teacher somewhat similar to that my freshman year in high school, except she was a last-minute replacement and was not really an English teacher. Her grammar was atrocious, and I ended up getting detention for correcting her too often (interrupting class or lack of respect or some such was the reason given on the detention). It was probably my first real experience with an authority figure being so utterly and obviously wrong, and I wasn't sorry at all for the detention. It was well worth it.

Just noticed this comment when I was looking through my messages for an old comment, and I wanted to respond.

It is the word "too" that is important there, and the usage you describe is only used as an affirmative for contradicting a negative statement (at least, that's proper grammar anyway).

For example, if the original statement had been "God must not make a boulder he cannot lift!" and I had responded with "God must too make a boulder he cannot lift!" you would be right, but the original statement is an affirmative statement ("God can make a boulder he cannot lift."), my own sentence before it is an affirmative (in the grammatical sense - not so much in the "uplifting" sense), so trying to contradict either with an affirmative doesn't make any sense.

Also, I did a Google search, and while using "too" between must and another verb is not common, using "must too" to mean "must also" is by far the most common usage I could find. I do admit that other combinations of verb "too" verb seem to imply contradicting a negation even without the proper context, so that usage is definitely not as clear as I originally thought it would be. I still think it's pretty, though.