Prometheus

What? I don't know how to break this to you but dogs eating grass isn't science. No wonder you get confused when people ask for evidence from you. And people believing something itself doesn't make it a fact, 'scientific' or otherwise. The difference between people believing the earth to be billions of years old versus thousands of years is evidence. By the way, the whole dogs eat grass to make themselves better is a myth. Or 'scientific fact' by your standards.

We don't know how rare sentience and civilisation are in the universe. At this point i think we owe it to any beings that follow in our wake to explain what we knew, even if just to tell them what not to do. What do you think that means and how do you suppose a dog does it?

If our extinction was slow and inevitable i'm sure some humans would get together and work on some kind of 'legacy project', anticipating that an intelligence would stumble upon it one day.

I thought i had showed you what evidence people are looking for in post 429. Can you provide some that looks like that, or are you just looking for emotional responses? Is that the real problem, you think people don't have enough of an emotional response to these atrocities?

So basically don't try to picture it?

Which other species engage in science? We've only been doing it ourselves a few hundred years. Unless you're using a really loose definition of science?

It's fine that you don't understand the scientific method, but you should try to learn it - you must have an interest in it to frequent a science forum, no? I've attached a boxplot from an analysis i have done. Global Peace Index data was taken from here, the majority religion of each country was taken mostly from here. Note Ibadi is a denomination of Islam found in Oman, NA refers to countries for which there was no official info on it (like North Korea), Prot means Protestantism, indigenous refers to various local religious beliefs, and None refers to countries were the majority follow no religion. I'll let people draw there own conclusions (i'm not going to as i could easily p-hack the data), but i share it because this is what scientists want to see when they ask for evidence, not news headlines, or 'my sister in hospital saw...' So when next someone asks for evidence, show them something like this, best from a peer reviewed journal unless you fancy doing it yourself. I also have data on homocide rates, wealth, scientific output and religiosity (percentage of people in a country for whom religion is important). I'll knock up a multiple regression model to explore it if/when i get a chance. Also, i'm happy to share data if anyone wants to analyse it themselves. Now, Itoero do you understand why we don't except repetition of a few data points (with some anecdotes chucked in) as evidence? Also, now you know what we are looking for, can you now provide the evidence? The issue has nothing to do with anyone's political bias, it is matter of evidence, and if it is as obvious as has been pointed out then the evidence should be really easy to show. Something like i shared above perhaps. GPIvsRel.pdf GPIvsRel.pdf

If we're in a simulation then our laws of physics are simulated by the computer. Why would the computer necessarily be subject to the laws of physics it is simulating? It may be subject to an entirely different reality. with different laws of physics. The only attribute we could give such a computer is that it is sufficiently sophisticated to simulate our universe, we can ascribe nothing more.

On this day, long ago, was born a man who would help lead the world from darkness. Happy birthday Isaac Newton.

Being overly PC might exist. Asking for evidence is not it. The day we can't ask for evidence without being derided for being too PC, or whatever else, is the day humanity has lost all hope. You rail so hard against religion, yet display dogmatic clinging worthy of any religion. I tried to explain to Itoero why all the instances he sites of Islamic violence are not evidence. They are individual data points, which no one is denying, which when statistically analysed together constitute evidence. The statistical analysis, amongst other things, ensures our emotional biases are mitigated. Itoero apparently didn't like this process: do you also have a problem with it? What part of it is PC? That's objectively not true - unless you can present evidence as strong as this. If it's so obvious then it should be easy to find some data, do a simple (but rigorous) statistical analysis and put us all in our place. Would you object to that, or is it too PC?

Itoero, with the best will in the world, you wouldn't know evidence if it waddled next to you wearing a christmas hat and started honking while slapping you with a dead fish. Let's return to the above and showing why we need to analyse raw data. So, if there is a relationship it more subtle than A causes B. It's more like A increases B, but only when a certain quantity of C is present, unless a certain level of D is also present... and so on. Are we agreed on this? But it may be a contributing factor. I'm not sure if we would be able detect this given the number of interacting variables and that the actual effect size may be small, but it's worth looking into to.

So we want the expectation of winning B to be greater than £100, which occurs when the probability of winning the million is one in ten thousand. This assumes the value of money is linear (i.e. that $1,000,000 is really 10,000 times more valuable than $100) - i don't think it is, but that's the human factor. We should also mention the variance of the game as button A has the very desirable property of having none. This is why even at 1 in 10000 chance of winning with button B (where the expectation is the same as with button A), you'd be mad to pick B. The variance is the true measure of risk here and how much one is willing to accept will change from person to person.

Surely we want to have some people narrowly focusing on one subject while others straddle a few subjects. But which is more important is bit like asking which organ is most important. You might think brain or heart at first, but try living without an anus - things will get shitty pretty quickly.

My uni is gearing up to teach much more maths (and some programming) in undergrad biology. Do you get to do a project with any of these choices? If so pick that one and make your project an exercise in applied mathematics.

I doubt it, i'm following an open uni book. I can pm a pdf of it if you like. Of course i don't mind, it'll likely help me too. Happy all the way up to the inner product being the Euclidean norm. I can follow the algebra from the definitions easy enough, but i can't internalise it. So these vectors are representations of functions (are they still classed as Euclidean vectors then?): i just can't picture what it means for a function to have a magnitude. Maybe it's my understanding of norms that needs addressing.

Just trying to clarify my understanding of some concepts regarding inner products and spaces. So the inner product in Dirac notation has been defined in my book as: [math]\langle a|b\rangle = \sum_i a_i^*b_i[/math] Does this definition include the complex conjugate, [math]a_i^*[/math], just so that the property [math] \langle a|a\rangle = \sum_i |a_i|^2[/math] is satisfied? i.e. is that property a defining feature or the corollary of some other defining feature? Also, is an inner product space then just the space spanned by the two vectors that form the inner product? For instance the inner product of cubic polynomials has been defined in my book as: [math]\langle a|b\rangle = \int_{-1}^1a^*(x)b(x)dx[/math] but i think we could also define it as [math] \langle a|b\rangle = \int_{-c}^ca^*(x)b(x)dx [/math] for any real (and complex?) c. If so would we have defined a different inner product space to the first one, or are they somehow the same?

I thought the first link was OK, only gets 'mathsy' in the figures. But if you're interested in these kind of problems why not learn some maths? It's hard work but it will allow to look at these problems in far more detail, and can also help look at other, apparently unrelated, problems.

Perhaps. It would be interesting to see if the 'god' meme develops in other species as they develop intellectually, but we'd be lucky to see that. It's allegory.

Possible, but not easy.

In many places humans can't marry other humans of the same sex, so imagine marriage to non-humans to be some way behind. Wouldn't it be awful if robots achieved sentience and the first thing they experience was sexual slavery. It would set a lurid tone for human/AI relations for a while.

The text i'm following, in preparation for using Dirac notation, is now arguing that the overlap integral is analogous to a dot product in some kind of generalised vector space called a function space. Not looked at generalised vector spaces before so this will be interesting. Hopefully it will shed light on the OP.

I imagine it's related to the pattern seeking behaviour of humans: a kind of celestial pareidolia. Maybe we can do an experiment where that part of the brain responsible for pareidolia is inhibited, then some measure of 'godness' is taken to test this. But the idea that something causes the river to flood and the seasons to turn must be an important development in a species. If something causes it, maybe we can influence it somehow. So the journey begins with the 'fall' of man.

I'm going back to my lego.

It's just a strange way of doing science, don't you think? You have a hypothesis that ethnicity affects university enrolment, but then immediately seek to restrict the dependent variable. Aren't you also interested how it varies over all ethnicities and explore what other variables might be having an effect? A lot of the things we are discussing in one thread will likely appear in the other thread - why not keep them in one place - at the very least it will mean i don't have to post everything i write twice to satisfy your idea of equality between the two.