This is interesting and somewhat relevant to the topic of this blog:
http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/summer07/Crit_Thinking.pdf
I agree; there may very well be the rare innately evil person, but promoting or implementing an ideology that is based on false premises that turns out to have evil consequences does not require "innate" evil. The 9/11 hijackers might very well be described as "neurologically intact people with beliefs that have utterly destroyed their sanity" but, if the beliefs they had about the state of the world were actually true (which they weren't!) then many value systems would endorse their actions.
If there were a diety that condemns unbelieve...
Does anyone have a book they can recommend that explains the actual math of quantum mechanics? Once I actually see the equations, things always start making sense to me. For example, my introductory modern physics course talked about the Schroedinger equation and had an optional section on operators and wave functions. Having suffered through Fourier analysis in my electrical engineering courses, the way the Heisenberg uncertainty principle comes from the application of transformations to wave functions made a kind of intuitive sense. I know an awful lot o...
Surely one could easily replicate this "lottery" by buying path-dependent options with low exercise probability on the financial markets. People are not doing this, so this service must be less appealing than it intuitively seems.
I wonder what the odds actually are on "striking it rich" in a short period of time by treating financial markets as a gambling game. Is it better or worse than, say, the roulette wheel in a casino? If you bet $30,000 on a single number in a roulette wheel, you have a one in 38 chance of getting a 35x payout of...
It's an uncommon viewpoint, but one could, perhaps, justify the purchasing of lottery tickets as a "donation to charity" of sorts; the money goes to support the activities of the government that runs the lottery, which is (hopefully) going to use that money for good purposes. As a financial investment, though, lottery tickets are generally a bust; I suspect you'd do better playing slot machines at a Las Vegas casino. (There's the complication of rollover jackpots, but they don't have to matter here.)
Speaking of "wealth without effort".....
If this were anything like my high school math class, everyone else in the class would decide to copy my answer. In some cases, I have darn good reasons to believe I am significantly better than the average of the group I find myself in. For example, I give one of my freshman chemistry midterms. The test was multiple choice, with five possible answers for each question. My score was an 85 out of 100, among the highest in the class. The average was something like 42. On the final exam in that class, I had such confidence in my own answer that I declared tha...
As a rabid game player, I find that the stimulation I get from playing some of my favorite video games is basically the same as the stimulation that I get from reading some of my favorite novels. There are some authors that I find to be more addictive than even some of the best games. (Terry Pratchett comes to mind.) Oddly enough, though, I find television oddly lacking when compared to print media and interactive media, as I keep wanting to DO something instead of watch passively. (Having another person watching along with me that I can talk with seems to...
Hedge funds might very well buy lottery tickets in certain circumstances if it were easy to buy them in large numbers. Sometimes the jackpots go so high that if you were to buy a ticket of every single possible lottery combination, it would cost less than the total prize money given out. However, states that run lotteries deliberately make it very difficult to buy millions of tickets, making this strategy impossible to execute in practice.
Rollover lottery jackpots can end up with prizes large enough so that the expected dollar value of a ticket is greater than the cost of a ticket; it's not necessarily foolish to buy a lottery ticket when the jackpot gets really large.
There are an awful lot of awful novice writers out there, though; just go to www.fanfiction.net and start reading. On the other hand, there are a couple of really brilliant writers there, too.
"Never give up" is bad advice?
Probability of success if you continue: small. Probability of success if you give up: zero.
Small is better than zero, am I right?
On the other hand, this analysis only matters if the cost of failure is no worse than the cost of giving up. The "rational" thing to do would be to give up if and only if (probability of success utility of success) + (probability of failure utility of failure) < (utility of giving up).
There are a lot of things that one can achieve through sheer persistence, but there are othe...
You're ignoring the probability of succeeding at something else. If you're still doing this, it's zero. If you give up, it's not.
Of course, that can also be considered a cost of failure, in which case you didn't ignore it.
Edit: This is equivalent to counting opportunity cost as a cost of failure that's not a cost of giving up, so maybe you weren't ignoring it.
"Those not willing to examine this evidence are following in the footsteps of Cardinal Bellarmine with his refusal to look through Galileo's telescope. And the refusal is for the same essential reasons: sociology and arrogance."
From the Crackpot Index: "40 points for comparing yourself to Galileo, suggesting that a modern-day Inquisition is hard at work on your case, and so on."
Anyway, based on what I've read, Sheldrake's experiments do return statistically significant results, but there tend to be problems with the experiments themselves that suggest the results are not caused by anything currently unknown to physics. For more details, just check out www.randi.org and search for Sheldrake's name.
Hmmm...
Q) Why do I believe that special relativity is true? A) Because scientists have told me their standards of evidence, and that the evidence for special relativity meets those standards.
I haven't seen anything contract when moving close to the speed of light. I haven't measured the speed of light in a vacuum and found that it is independent of the non-accelerating motion of the observer. I haven't measured a change in mass during nuclear reactions. I simply hear what people tell me, and decide to believe it.
George Orwell put it far more elegantly, and...
My father is a college professor and he's going to be teaching an introduction to engineering course to future electrical engineering students. He's planning on making the students learn basic electromagnetic theory by forcing them to try to perform their own experiments with a pile of stuff that would have existed around 1900 or so.
"Today's assignment: In 1820, Hans Christian Ørsted discovered a relationship between electricity and magnetism. Replicate his experiment and demonstrate that a relationship exists."
Hopefully, some student will eventu... (read more)