Popcorn Sutton

It's more of a meritocracy. I don't know how the pay system would work though. I don't know if I agree completely with those definitions either. It's a sortician. It could be either but whichever one actually works.

A program would select the right person for the job, no one evaluates it, it's like winning the lottery. But you win because you're smart. And while you're in office you can go down the list and check it off one by one and ask if people are satisfied. Get as many language samples as possible.

Can we add a little to it through? At least add a bit about the language sample and statistics. Or add more involving other sciences. And if there's one about scientocracy can I get involved?

Spoken, written, sign, whatever people want to say gets put on a list and whoever knows the most gets elected.

Or is it going to do the opposite? I don't know I took the chance. Someone want to edit it? I can't do it right now I'm using my phone. The Wikipedia by the way I changed it and I don't know if I should have.

Scientocracy- Improving democracy by either replacing the voting system in favor of using language, or complimenting the voting system by adding an optional language sample. By submitting a language sample, statistical analysis will help prioritize issues of significance and select the right politicians, which is theorized to promote productivity and speed up the growth of the economy.

That's not my intention, but I'll keep it in mind . You still didn't answer my questions though.

I'm just posting information, not that I agree with it. I do agree with you, but this was the question. What do you consider to be a Scientocracy? Are you leaning towards Utopia or Dystopia? What are the benefits and detriments of the possibility? Would you support my claim that we should replace the voting system (or at least compliment it with a writing sample)? I really enjoyed reading this one.

I agree completely with your statement about Lysenkoism, I think that that comment was completely uncalled for. A scientocracy would not even be remotely near Lysenkoism. So what is a scientocracy by your standards? Timothy Birdnow A religious perspective- To further elaborate on the religious perspective, I recently joined the Catholic Answer Forums (don't shun me), if you want to see the post, you can find it here. But I will quote part of it- The irony here is that when I mentioned that there was a recent consensus on the freedom of will on behalf of highly respected scientists and the Supreme Court, they responded with "[We were not aware of this.]" Since the Republican party is so stuck on this whole religion thing, I figured that I might as well join those forums and see if I can't help settle the right-wing radicals who really need to educate themselves prior to being elected. I can only hope that we have something like scientocracy by the next big election. I'm considering nominating myself for public office and seeing what I can do. Another person elaborates on the Lysenkoism hypothesis of Scientocracy.

The fact that he made so many quotes was what led me to believe that he was unbiased. Also, a commentator said, in review of the article, "[Casey makes his argument on scientific grounds.]" Maybe he's not so scientific though because later in the response, it says "[Casey says that there are very good arguments against...]" <-This is not scientific in my opinion, he didn't make any citations.

I don't understand what you're saying here. Could you elaborate? I don't know who this is, but he also states this- I read in a catholic forum that they "[do not wish to abolish science because it does not always contradict the 'Sacred Scripture',]" but that they "[despise those who feel that they are entitled to speak on behalf of everyone else and persuade politicians to believe that it is the consensus.]" As also stated in an Evangelist blog, "[The consensus is not even a scientific notion. If everyone concedes to a wrongful view, then that should not be seen or used as evidence to persuade others, including politicians, to invest in things such as reducing CO2 emissions because doing that is obviously detrimental to our economic well-being.]" I agree with these people. Discoveries are made by individuals. It's over time that the discoveries become recognized by other individuals and eventually become a consensus. It's when someone comes along and adjusts, justifiably stipulates, or, if we get lucky, proves a theory wrong that we, as individuals, praise, look forward to, and rejoice over. It's a very rare occurrence to find out something new about ourselves and our universe, but when it comes around, it's very uplifting for scientists. It gives hope, it brings peace, it makes things accessible, and, if we get lucky, it prevents pain and loss. If there's one thing I know about psychology, it's that our greatest fears, as biological machines, are death and rejection. I'd argue that rejection is number 1 on the list. Paraphrasing these people above, as I have stated many times, there is a way to go about revitalizing ones economy. Gather as much data as possible and do what you can to analyze it. The most statistically significant priorities will automatically come on top (and in my experience, the most statistically significant stuff is THE ALPHABET, phonemes, diphthongs, morphemes... or, plainly stated, EDUCATION. Strange huh?). The most significant thing we can do in a childs life, or in anyones life, is to maximize their knowledge. I truly believe that because we live and experience, we are consistently maximizing our knowledge. I would feel absolutely, unimaginably, empathetic towards someone without the capacity to do that.

Rajneesh, I'm saying this because I respect your admiration for science and mean no harm. 1) you're going to get banned if you keep up this charade, do not hijack threads, and try not to soapbox (meaning don't put yourself behind the podium). If you have an argument, people will discuss it, but at least try to make it practical. My purpose for engaging in scientific inquiry is to benefit humanity as soon as possible and without partaking in science fiction. If I do not know how something works, I kindly ask for explanation (as I have done above). I sincerely try to propose solutions for current conundrums, and I try to make them plausible in any way that I can. You may want to consider this approach. 2) You can't change the laws of physics, I'm not even going to bother trying to explain why (because I don't know) or kneel in your honorable presence. Understand that it is neither appealing for consideration, nor practical for our purposes (as leaders in the search for explanation, convenience, and prevention of death). Your argument is theology at this point.

I don't understand what you mean when you say noise. I know that speech recognition works regardless of the noise. And I know why it works. When you say noise, I instantly think of noise reduction (computational linguistics and statistics).

But what if you're not measuring the particle? What if you're just measuring the effect it has on the box?

I disregard your comment Klaynos. I don't expect that it was sarcasm (although it could've been). If you want to try and explain why it's wrong I'd be interested in hearing it. I have a question though. What do you guys think of this as a possible explanation for quantum entanglement? I also have an idea of how to transmit information via entanglement. What you do is you get a box, you suspend some particles in superposition in the box, then, just like a magician, you cut the box in half. You take one of the boxes wherever you want to transmit the information to, then you talk to one of the boxes and you should be able to hear the particles vibrate at the other end. If there's too much noise, use Bayes to reduce it.

Maybe, if our politicians wise up, they'll consider reviewing information provided by groups who concern themselves with statistics such as- http://www.rss.org.uk/site/cms/contentChapterView.asp?chapter=1 And http://www.amstat.org But I don't know if they have big data (which would definitely help) or if they use natural language processing to acquire the information necessary for local, regional, and global prioritization. My preference would be nlp rather than polls because it's much easier to bias polls And because I'm a huge fan of big data. I really like this video, and I do think that I've influenced him in some way, but he argues against evolution, not for ID/creationism though. I wish I knew which part of the video it was in, maybe about a half hour in. It really is a great video though. Theory of Everything Trey Smith I can't post the link sorry

I guess this is a question stirring up recently. I'm leaning towards a yes actually, but as I have stated in a previous thread, my ideal scientocracy would be one that uses statistics rather than the voting system. The fact of the matter is that, and I might be a little biased in saying this because I do consider myself a scientist, I do believe that we are living in a scientocracy, however, I do not believe that we are using statistics to the ideal extent. In this video, Improving Democracy- Fast Economic Growth- Scientocracy, Dr. Carlos Sabillon lobbies Scientocracy as the answer to economic disaster, and he's a very open vocalist about it as well (talking about it on TV, lobbying it in Brazil during this time in the revolution). He talks about the economic history of the USA and select countries in Europe and makes a correlation between "idiots" and a low, declining, GDP. He says "[Why was George W. Bush elected president? He was not fit for the job! The only reason he would get elected is because his father was in office.]" In this video, the UK ponders whether we live in a Scientocracy or not. As I stated above, the more I think about it, the more it seems that we do, in fact, live in a Scientocracy. Again, we're not using statistics to our advantage. We need to localize priorities, analyze peoples writing statistically, and see what the bulk of the evidence suggests. We need to put a bit of confidence in our priorities rather than just focusing on global warming and carbon emissions. One guy in that video says "it's not binary, it's not like it's either evidence based or not evidence based, there's a strength behind it." Here's a podcast by a young enthusiast that seems to have no bias at all about a scientocracy. I don't think that the Wikipedia article gives it much justice.

Wow Swansont, I'm truly honored to hear you say that. I have a question relevant to this discussion then. If you have a vacuum, and you try to heat it up or freeze it, does it change the temperature in the vacuum? If so, how fast does the temperature change? I looked at this, but I'm still a little confused about it.

I'll let the moderators chime in on this one.

Well, first let me address the quantum entanglement noise thing. There may be noise involved in the process which prevents the transfer of information in a classical sense, but, in a statistical sense, information can be transferred in the sense that if you know that the only options are heads and tails, the particle you measure comes up heads and the information you know now is that there is a 100% chance that the other particle is tails. It's not the type of information we want to transfer, but I guess there should be a way just by using statistics. Maybe I can elaborate on this point but I'm pretty sure that I'm going to have to let this idea sit for a little while. I submit to a computational theory of the mind and have a very elaborate set of code that I use just for the purpose of acquiring language. It may be relevant because there was a part in the code that I had to describe very literally (just by using logic and mathematics) quantum entanglement. It was a necessary component for grammatical output. The strange part is that there is a list that is necessary for it to work, you need to have, what I call, emerging units. It's a bunch of sequences of occurrences that arise, but it happens so quickly that there's no way for articulators to be involved. There's no way of getting around having the list of emerging units, so this may be relevant to the transfer of information, but we just can't measure it happening physically (yet). The question I asked to get to that point is "what does it take to make a computer able to learn any language?" I asked that question about 9 years ago, and I'm pretty confident that I have finally put that question to rest. Like I said above though, I think that it's going to take some time before I can explain how we can transfer information over entanglement, but I'm relatively certain that, if it can happen, statistics will help. I do think that Bayes theorem can help us reduce the noise (it has done very well with speech recognition technology). Before you read this next part, I need to warn you that I haven't made any conclusion. It's not necessary to read, but I'm posting it anyway because some people might find it an interesting train of thought. 1) As they have noted above, even at absolute zero, there is still motion (which means that something is happening). I'm not completely convinced of this argument because I think that it's still theoretical, unless someone has demonstrated otherwise (but I doubt it). If there is a process that can help us achieve this, I would call it a flash freeze. I've been hesitant to say this on the forums, but it's been lingering in my mind for some time now so I guess I'll come out with it. After a strong enough explosion, you'll notice that the dirt or sand at the center of the explosion has turned to glass. Although the explosion is actually very hot, I guess you could call this process a "flash freeze" because the sand is now a shard of glass. Unfortunately, I don't think that an explosion will suffice for the preservation of the body. What we want is the exact opposite of disintegration. I'd suggest creating a bubble around the body that will absolutely prevent anything from occurring within the bubble. Sounds simple enough right? Why not just make a big ball of extremely powerful steel that can roll from one point to another. The problem is thermodynamics here. This is why I suggested an absolute freeze. To me, it seems that absolute zero would freeze even the Higg's field, and because of this, it would suffice. My speculation is that the reason that quantum entanglement is possible is because the Higg's field itself is frozen and it's in a solid state, as well as the matter surrounding it. So, even if the particles we observe to be entangled are only a foot apart, the Higg's field that was contained within one of those particles could have literally traveled 10^20^118 light years to get to the same point in time, just in a different location, and it could've done it (from the particles point of view) in literally an instant. So as I suggested above, it's like a quantum deja vu. The problem here is that we need to magnify the frozen Higg's field so that it can solidify the matter surrounding it as well. How can we do that? Well, I would suggest using a vacuum, but the problem is that we do not want to separate the matter from the point of interest, and in this case, the point of interest is the exact center of every bit of matter contained within the body. We just want to magnify the Higg's field. Well, one way we can do that is by literally pushing the matter towards the center while it wants to expand. For that, we would need the repulsive force. We need quantum gravity. Ok this is highly speculative, and I'm afraid that I'm using too many labels here that are not fully understood, so this as well will have to sit for some time in my mind because there's obviously no known mechanism at this moment which can achieve this task so I, myself, or with the help of others, will need to contemplate this idea to find a way of making it plausible. 2) I've thought that the word "time" itself is phlogiston for a while now. I call "time" prompting because of my background in computational neuroscience, and I consider it to be a quantum event. The part of the equation for prompting is this. m = P(u|t) This says that the mind is equal to the most probable sequence of occurrences given its location in "time" with respect to other units which are contained within knowledge. The part of the equation that defines time is this- t = y(u). "Time" is equal to any positive number (including 0) of units. The problem here is that you can't just take a unit and throw it anywhere, time has to be precisely organized or else you won't have the proper order in the output (it won't be grammatical). This is how I define a unit, it's a linear bounded object. u = y(o). A unit is equal to any positive whole number of occurrences including 0 occurrences. This much is how statistical mechanics works. The law that I've proposed is that nothing is faster than t while t = 0(o). It can also be said as, nothing is faster than t while t = 0(u). This suggests that, with respect to an observer, if the observer is the Higg's field itself, or if the observer is "nothing", then it's literally the fastest thing in the universe and it can travel from opposite ends of our universe instantly, it can even travel to our universe from another universe instantly. It can come from the past, the future, or the present in literally no time at all. So the problem here is that with our bodies, we are made up of 7*10^27 units at least. These units are not only subatomic, but they go all the way from the very small to the very large where the entire body itself is 1 unit and everything less than the body is 1 unit as well. We have to preserve the order itself. So if t = 7*10^27(u) (at least) at any given moment, then we are going to be very slow in relation to something else where t = 1(u). Ok, that being said, imagine if we eliminate all units and just leave one, the most maximal unit, which may be the body and its surrounding environment. So, if we completely ignore the liver and the spleen and all the atoms within the body and surrounding the body and treat it all as one unit, then t = 1(u), and it should be able to travel very fast. The math is there, but we just need to reduce the occurrences. 3) I know we need the mechanics, but as I said before, I'm going to need to let this one sit for a little while before I can come up with an answer. I'm sure it's out there, because it is possible in the math, but I just need to find an example, one that hopefully doesn't involve surrounding a body with a black hole. 4) SM means Statistical Mechanics, not the Standard Model. What I mean is that you can go from earth to doppelgänger earth in less than a second and travel literally 10^20^118 light years away as long as you have a craft that can navigate for you and you a frozen in time within the craft. You can go shake your own hand in less than a second if we were able to do this mechanically. In a technical sense, that means that you're travelling faster than the speed of light because it would take light 10^20^118 years to get from earth to doppelganger earth, but from your point of view, it only took less than a second. Hence, you traveled MUCH MUCH faster than light (from your point of view).

You guys have to provide citations. It's part of the rules for this forum. "Google it" does not suffice.

Lawrence Krauss I've had a fascination in your work recently and I thank you for talking about these things, especially the something from nothing hypothesis. I'm going to continue watching your talks and hope that you participate on these forums. If you are reading this, and you haven't seen my new thread, check this out. Max Tegmark You're awesome, seriously. I've watched a few of your talks and I relate with your ideas so closely that I feel that my own speculations have had a good impact on what you vocalize. That is awesome for me to know, even though I can't say for sure whether I have affected your point of view. I know that you work at MIT and I'm reasonably certain that my ideas have influenced a lot of people from MIT. Leonard Susskind You give me hope man. You started off as a plumber, which is not very different from my original profession. I've been watching your talks on YouTube as well, not recently, but I've seen plenty of them. I admire how you work with statistical mechanics because I know that it is a relatively recent field of interest. To all of you, I feel absolutely honored to be living in these times, to be able to collaborate with you (if I even have), and to be able to watch you guys on the science channel and on YouTube. You all are truly inspiring and I hope that I can be of the same stature one of these days.

I'm sorry I'm just admiring the irony of the argument. We were right all along.

Well, it is a physics argument because it involves statistical mechanics, but the point is that as long as nothing happens, then you're traveling faster than c. In this sense, you're technically traveling faster than c right now.

What do you mean with the laser dot example? I don't think it rules out quantum entanglement as an FTL system. Imagine that you want to send a message to another planet that is light years away and want to get a response in less than a second. What you can do is send them the message, freeze yourself in time so as to not let anything happen within your experience, and when the response is estimated to arrive, unfreeze yourself and look at your phone and it will say "new message". This would happen in less than a second, whereas it would've taken years for the message to be transmitted and responded to if you only relied on the speed of light. The point here is that you're not only relying on the speed of light to transmit the information, you're also using the speed of time to make sure you get your response in less than a second. I'm defining time as a 1 to 1 correlation with experience. The argument is that without experience, there would be no time. If you can't experience things as they happen, then per QM they are not happening. I'd argue that from a statistical point of view with respect to acquisition, if nothing happens, then nothing is faster than the speed of light. Imagine being in new York city, blinking, but when you open your eyes your in Seattle. Nothing happened, but now your miles away from where you started. That means that you traveled faster than c because light could have taken 2 minutes to get there while it only took you a half a second. This is not the framework of special relativity, this is statistical mechanics. In SM, acquisition is built in to the theory itself. You cannot have SM without acquisition. You need to have priors before you can make a prediction. In order to get the priors, you need acquisition (pattern recognition, learning). So, per SM, you can very literally travel faster than c as long as you are the one doing it. Ok, here's a thought experiment. Assume that there are many worlds and an infinite number or copies of our own world including past, present, and future copies all existing simultaneously somewhere within this universe. Imagine that one particle is an observer, and it has a copy of itself IN THE FUTURE that is approximately 10^30288 light years away. When that particle observes its surroundings at that point in time, it never observes quite the same thing until it observes itself exactly in that point in time again, but the observation just happens to be 10^30288 light years away the next time it observes that same moment. If nothing happened between those two moments, or even if 10^24927 things happened between those moments, it's as if nothing happened because you remember exactly what happened at the starting point, and hence, it's as if nothing happened. It's like a quantum Deja Vu. Maybe there's a better way of explaining that thought experiment but the law still holds.