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I'm working on adding elements to a report at work that does data visualization on a large scale (the data set is about 1 million data points; it's really not all that impressive of a subject matter, but I can't be terribly specific). The report has all of the "easy" elements I need in it, but now I'm trying to add in the harder elements. My ultimate end goal would be to add in the more complicated data along with system parameters, so I can get a handle on how parameter changes affect the output. I'd love to see Bayes nets and the like make a triumphant entrance at some point. But near as I can tell, I'd be the local expert on all of that, and anything I know about that subject matter I mostly picked up from here.
I believe the article the OP points to is actually more about how system 2 is being engaged in these systems, and is therefore not "blind obedience", i.e. a simple heuristic being engaged. From the conclusion:
On the other hand, it ignores the evidence that those who do heed authority in doing evil do so knowingly not blindly, >actively not passively, creatively not automatically. They do so out of belief not by nature, out of choice not by necessity. >In short, they should be seen—and judged—as engaged followers not as blind conformists
Equally, what is shocking about Milgram's experiments is that rather than being distressed by their actions, participants >could be led to construe them as “service” in the cause of “goodness.”
At root, the fundamental point is that tyranny does not flourish because perpetrators are helpless and ignorant of their >actions. It flourishes because they actively identify with those who promote vicious acts as virtuous [49]. It is this >conviction that steels participants to do their dirty work and that makes them work energetically and creatively to ensure >its success. Moreover, this work is something for which they actively wish to be held accountable—so long as it secures >the approbation of those in power.
To put words into their mouth, I believe they are arguing that people's system 2's are overriding the "don't hurt people" heuristic of system 1, as opposed to system 2 analysis being overridden by a simple obedience heuristic.
I'm leery of organizations providing their own statistics on how effective they are, which may just be another form of lobbying and propaganda. I'd lean towards carving out from the budget a group that independently assesses effectiveness of each of the organizations. It's admittedly imperfect, but it would be more impartial than what seems to be in place now, and agencies wouldn't necessarily be at a disadvantage for lacking their own internal measurement tools. That still leaves the problem of choosing the right metrics. Something simple like budget percentages and ratios would be a good place to start. There are a lot of hard-to-compare types of services out there; after school programs aren't like Meals on Wheels programs. It's hard to come up outcome based metrics to say which service is better than another when there's so many different categories. Adopting something along the lines of the financial ratings at Charity Navigator could at least get everyone on the same page for controlling costs at their organizations.
Moreover, no woman is ever going to be drawn to that, at least that I've ever heard. So it doesn't make sense as a grossly misguided pick-up strategy. Thinking about it and reading the thread, the more I think something along the lines of the Berne Games People Play dynamic is at work. It's the most charitable reading you can give to the behavior at least; the jerks taking part in this are getting some kind of attention from the woman they're targeting, even though it's negative attention. Still extremely hurtful behavior, but I can believe (or at least kid myself into believing) that men can gain insight into the behavior, realize what's going on, and stop doing it.
One of the more humiliating moments of my adult life was when two guys were making lewd comments to a female friend of mine across a parking lot. I felt absolutely helpless (I'll be blunt, they were far away and it was obvious they would kick my a__), and I can only imagine what my friend went through. She weathered it, but I'm sure that came at some cost to her psyche that women spend to much time and effort bearing. I can only say it's in the best interests of men and women if this was all curtailed.
"Its importance is not merely the individual Games, but the idea of what a Game is and why people Play them."
From Berne: "Because there is so little opportunity for intimacy in daily life, and because some forms of intimacy (especially if intense) are psychologically impossible for most people, the bulk of the time in serious social life is taken up with playing games. Hence games are both necessary and desirable, and the only problem at issue is whether the games played by an individual offer the best yield for him."
So, you can debate the validity, but my take on the Berne-ian view would be that the game Catcall is the attempt to create a social boost for males by gaining a female's (albeit negative) attention.
Thanks, I corrected that.
I think this explanation from Wiblin* is most likely: "Nonetheless, I think this is more likely tha[t] a broad pool of Intrade participants [were] being enthusiastic about Romney against all the evidence, and [were] unaware that they could get better odds elsewhere." Is there enough evidence to investigate whether something more sinister is at work? I certainly don't know the details on Intrade and other similar markets, but perhaps there should be more stringent transparency rules to prevent potential manipulations.
Implications: What has always struck me as difficult for prediction markets is the fact that they aren't pricing an underlying "thing"; they're pricing uncertainty itself. Even in a futures or options market, there is an underlying right to purchase at a specific price, even if that right is useless due to the current price of the commodity or stock being lower. While the options or futures contract has a potential value on a certain date, there isn't anything of value being bought and sold on a prediction market. It's just bets based on information that everyone will know on a specific date. So to me, all the pluses you get from other markets that pertain to large groups grappling over how to price good don't apply to prediction markets, because there aren't any underlying assets to price. To me, markets do a good job of rationally arriving at prices because of the constant negotiations and comparisons going on for the underlying assets. People make predictions on where market prices will go, but to me that isn't the same as these being prediction markets. The implication of all this is that for me it's not surprising to hear that there was such a large arbitrage potential between the prediction markets. I'm not such a believer in the efficient market hypothesis to believe that there isn't arbitrage potential in asset markets, but I would predict that these are fewer and smaller than there would be in prediction markets. I don't see this as an unsolvable problem, but to me it shows what prediction markets are good for, which is to keep people honest in their premises and expectations. Take a global warming discussion with a AGW proponent on one side and an AGW skeptic on another. Sans a prediction market, either person could make as dire or as rosy a claim as they like; once they start putting real money on the line, both will likely become more interested in accuracy. If all prediction markets did was to routinely get people to adhere to rational discussion (and thus adhere to Aumann's agreement theorem), arenas such as public policy would improve immensely. So, it doesn't matter that the Intrade bets didn't reflect the best of odds; that just means one of the rational actors hadn't fully adjusted yet; once their account was debited, once would assume that they were in agreement now with the party on the other end of the bet.
*Corrected
I've been enjoying this series so far, and I found this article to be particularly helpful. I did have a minor suggestion. The turnstile and the logical negation symbols were called out, and I thought it might be useful to explicitly breakdown the probability distribution equation. The current Less Wrong audience had little problem with it, certainly, but if you were showing it to someone new to this for the first time, they might not be acquainted with it. I was thinking something along the lines of this from stattrek:
"Generally, statisticians use a capital letter to represent a random variable and a lower-case letter, to represent one of its values. For example,
X represents the random variable X.
P(X) represents the probability of X.
P(X = x) refers to the probability that the random variable X is equal to a particular value, denoted by x. As an example, P(X = 1) refers to the probability that the random variable X is equal to 1."
(from http://stattrek.com/probability-distributions/probability-distribution.aspx)
Also, page 2 of A Student's Guide to Maxwell's Equations does a great job of diagramming Gauss' law for electrical fields, and I think it would be helpful if this were available to breakdown the right half of the equation, with the beginning reader seeing a breakdown of the equation.
http://books.google.com/books?id=I-x1MLny6y8C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
If this all was set aside in the footnote, the overall continuity of the article wouldn't be affected, and someone who might be intimidated at first by equations might see that these aren't so bad. With just a bit of exposition, more readers might be able to follow along with the entire argument, which I think could be introduced to someone with very little background.
That's true, my original statement is too broad. To your point, that people are skeptical of cryonics in general, I am in complete agreement, and that's what I was trying to get at in my final point.
I would disagree with the proposition that people are in any way actually OK with death. I don't think the problem is that people are at peace with death too much; instead, it's an issue that people are so afraid of death that they don't talk or even think realistically about it at all. The quotes you listed above sound like people were speaking hypothetically; if they were in an actual situation where their life was medically threatened but an intervention would likely save them I'm sure they would take the intervention without much consideration (barring depression). Instead, I believe the fear of death is so great, rational thinking about it is pushed aside. It's worse than Stockholm Syndrome, it's learned helplessness. People don't buy cryonics plans for the same reason they don't buy life insurance in the first place or even write a will, in that they're procrastinating in putting together concrete plans for something that makes them feel extremely uncomfortable.
The cryonics specific sales pitch doesn't have any happy early adopters running around saying "Thank Hanson I signed up! A cure was right around the corner, just 3 years away from being on the open market. If I hadn't enrolled I'd be...DEAD!" We're obviously not at that point yet, but if a Peter Thiel (to pull a name out of the air) were to use cryonics and successfully return to the land of the thawed, a hypothetical would become an actual, and people would become much more interested.
That's an interesting link to Rorty; I'll have to read it again in some more detail. I really appreciated this quote:
We have come to see that the only lesson of either history or anthropology is our extraordinary malleability. We are coming to think of ourselves as the flexible, protean, self-shaping, animal rather than as the rational animal or the cruel animal.
That really seems to hit it for me. That flexibility, the sense that we can step beyond being warlike, or even calculating, seems to be critical to what morals are all about. I don't want to make it sound like I'm against a generally moral culture, where happiness is optimized (or some other value I like personally). I just don't think moral philosophizing would get us there. I'll have to read up more on the moral sentiments approach. I have read some of Rorty's papers, but not his major works. I would be interested to see these ideas of his paired with meme theory. Describing moral sentiment as a meme that enters a positive feedback loop where groups that have it survive longer than ones that don't seems very plausible to me.
I'll have to think more about your PETA question. I think it goes beyond sympathy. I don't know how to test the positions though. I don't think viewing chickens as being equally morally significant would lead to a much better world (for humans - chickens are a different matter). Even with the moral sentiment view, I don't see how each side could come to a clear resolution.
This isn't so much a critique against consequentialism as the attempt at creating objective moral systems in general. I would love for the world to follow a particular moral order (namely mine). But there are people who, for what I would see as being completely sane reasons, disagree with me. On the edges, I have no problem writing mass murderers off as being insane. Beyond that, though, in the murky middle, there are a number of moral issues (and how is that dividing line drawn? Is it moral to have anything above a sustenance level meal if others are starving i the world, for instance?) that I see as leading only to endless argument. This doesn't indicate one of the sides is being disingenuous, just that they have different values that cannot be simultaneously optimized. The Roman gladiator post by another commenter is an example. I view the Romans as PETA members would view me. I have justifications for my actions, as I'm sure Romans had for their actions. That's just the nature of the human condition. Academic moral philosophizing always comes across to me as trying to unearth a cosmic grading scale, even if there isn't a cosmic grader.
Couldn't that just be due to a higher number of total votes (both up an down) for the OP? I would assume fewer people read each comment, and downvoters may have decided to only weigh in on the OP. A hypothetical controversial post could have a karma of 8, with 10 downvotes negating 10 upvotes, and a supportive comment could have 9 upvotes due to half of the upvotes of the first post giving it their vote. The comment has higher karma, but lower volatility, so to speak.
I won't be attending*, but just out of curiosity, what did you have in mind for the social effectiveness curriculum? Any particular authors that you recommend for things like body language, communication, etc.?
*Due to life constraints, but it sounds very interesting!
Thank you, very much appreciated.
Prior to reading that one study, I would be in complete agreement. After, though, I'm not so sure. Really for any job where routine judgements are being made, I would have just naturally assume that habit would take over. That's why the study was jarring for me; it really does seem to demonstrate that at different times, supposedly expert decision makers came to different conclusions based on their physiology. Now, it could be that legal issues are more based on personal opinion and biases, and really don't rely on making decisions based on rational standards. My thinking, though, is that these are two domains (medicine and law) that share the common element of making a decision based on certain pre-established criteria.
Thirded, especially because I have daughter on the way!
But you have to take a Scientologist class to join? You couldn't just join a Toastmasters somewhere else and then show up, for instance?
I guess the only quibble I would have, and I don't know that it really changes your critique much, is that I wrote that neurons would be some sort of gate equivalent. I wouldn't say that neurons have a simple gate model (that they're simply an AND or an XOR, for instance). But I do see them as being in some sense Boolean. Anyway, I would just try to clarify my fairly short answer to say that I believe that computation can always be broken down into smaller Boolean steps, and these steps could be rendered in many different media.
Computationality in any fashion needs to be reified by physics doesn't it? Otherwise it wouldn't exist. Now, I would say it's an emergent feature; physics doesn't need to provide anything beyond what is provided for anything else to explain it. Maybe that's the point of contention?
The sales pitchiness is another complaint I've heard. So let me ask you this; what authors do you feel approximate the training? I heard Heidegger was a big part.
Point taken. And Zimbardo's potential agenda can be questioned as well. Here's an instruction from the wiki page:
"You can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, and they'll have no privacy... We're going to take away their individuality in various ways. In general what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. That is, in this situation we'll have all the power and they'll have none."
That seems like pretty loaded language to me. And it speaks to the password hypothesis. It also steps beyond what I would consider to be any sort of attempt at an ethical prison system. To say that it's the unspoken "truth" of any prison situation is a huge leap made by Zimbardo.
Building on your blue collar kid example, if you moved the experiment to a service academy (West Point say), give the guards the instructions to uphold military code as they know it, assign an officer who was in charge of an actual prison to be the warden, and have the situation independently monitored, and I would guess you don't get the same situation as the SPE. Zimbardo seems to acknowledge that the presence of clear rules is a mitigating factor, as he states numerous times that it was the laxness of the night shift at Abu Ghraib that led to the prisoner abuse (in his view). That's a confound with the explicit instructions he gave in the situation he created.
Zimbardo discusses the members of the experiment in his book the Lucifer Principle. They were from very different backgrounds than criminals, though they seemed to be very countercultural as well, which still makes the end result surprising. Regarding Zimbardo's take on the whole thing (ethics & impact), I think he does cop to the experiment being unethical, and his behavior being unethical as well. I don't know if it's a case of being localized to Stanford, but I do completely agree that it's a case of guessing the password; in fact, that's pretty much how I read Zimbardo's take on it. He was creating an environment where the password was the increasingly abusive behavior. That's why he sees the experiment as being relevant to Abu Ghraib; guards were living up to an implicit password within the context of their roles on the nightshift. The next and more practical question would be whether or not the existence of such passwords is really universal.
There was an attempted replication that Zimbardo critiques in his book. That replication (which was a reality show, btw; so more confounds are present, though whether that's anymore real than a Stanford LARP is up for debate) had very different results than Zimbardo's. Prisoners there found some solidarity, which Zimbardo predicts would be broken by a more repressive prison structure. It's at that point where I'm fine with the arguments staying observational and theoretical and not moving into experimentation. It's not that I don't think the study of humanity's darker sides aren't important, it's just that I don't think it's acceptable to move into what would seem to be very unethical experimental setups.
I appreciated the candor Zimbardo put into his book, but that candor underscores your criticisms. Milgram was far more rigorous in his controls, and in his ethics. If one were to "duplicate" Zimbardo, it would need to be done with confederates in the fashion of Milgram's experiments, and would likely boil down to being an extension of Milgram.
I would describe myself as a computationalist by default, in that I can't come up with an ironclad argument against it. So, here are my stabs:
1) I'm not sure what you mean by an abstract machine (and please excuse me if that's a formal term). Is that a potential or theoretical machine? That's how I'm reading it. If that's the case, I would say that CIRJC means both a and b. It's a computation of an extremely sophisticated algorithm, the way 2 + 2 = 4 is the computation of a "simple" one (that still needs something really big like math to execute).
2) I don't know if there needs to be a particular class of models; do you mean we know in advance what the particular human consciousness model is? I'd probably say we'd need several models operating in parallel, and that set would be the "human consciousness model".
3) To me, that just means that a simple state machine took in an input, executed some steps, and provided an output on a screen. There was some change of register positions via electricity.
4) Computing red: here's where qualia is going to make things messy. In a video game, I don't have any problem imagine someone issuing a command to a Sim to "move the red box" and the Sim would do so. That's all computation (I don't think there's "really" a Sim or a red box for that matter living in my TV set), but the video game executed what I was picturing in my head via internal qualia. So it seems like there would be an approximation of "computing" red.
5) I don't have any problem saying the algorithm would be very important. I can put this in completely human terms. A psychopath can perfectly imitate emotions, and enact the exact same behavioral output as someone else in similar circumstances. The internal algorithm, if you will, is extremely different however.
6) I would say this is an emphatic yes. Neurons, for instance, serve as some sort of gate analog.
7) I think it would mention qualia, in as much as people would ask about it (so there would at least be enough of an explanation to explain it away, so to speak).
8) I don't think computations are conscious in and of themselves. If I'm doing math in notebook, I don't think the equations are conscious. I don't think the circuitry of a calculator or a computer are conscious. That said, I don't think individual cells of my brain are conscious, and if you were to remove portion of a person's brain (surgery for cancer, for example) that those portions remain conscious, or that person is less conscious by the percentage of tissue removed. Consciousness, to me, may be algorithmically based, but is still the awareness of self, history, etc. that makes humans human. Saying CIRJC doesn't remove the complexity of the calculation.
I haven't read that other thread; can I ask what your opinions are? Briefly of course, and while I can't speak for everyone else, I promise to read them as thumbnails and not absolute statements to be used against you. You could point to writers (Searle? Penrose?) if you like.
My understanding that the est of the 70's employed a fairly confrontational format. Do you feel that helped the learning process by making it more personal? I have talked to folks who drew a lot out of the training but weren't fans of the est organization (the group, that is, not the format of the training).
I think you should read up on the conjunction fallacy. Your example does not address the observations made in research by Kahneman and Tversky. The questions posed in the research do not assume causal relationships, they are just two independent probabilities. I won't rewrite the whole wiki article, but the upshot of the conjunction fallacy is that people using representativeness heuristic to asses odds, instead of using the correct procedures they would have used if that heuristic isn't cued. People who would never say "Joe rolled a six and a two" is more likely than "Joe rolled a two" do say "Joe is a New Yorker who rides the subway" is more likely than "Joe is a New Yorker", when presented with information about Joe.
I'll be happy to take a cut if the RP folks are so inclined :) But I think emotional management in poker and games in general is important to succeed in those arenas, and underscores the need for this component in rationality training.
There was a case in my local area where a teenager beat another teeanger to death with a bat. On another blog, some commenters were saying that since his brain wasn't fully developed yet (based on full brain development being attained close to 30), he shouldn't be held to adult standards (namely sentencing standards). This was troubling to me, because while I don't advocate the cruelty of our current prison system, I do worry about the message that lax sentencing sends. The commenets seem to naturally allow for adult freedom (the kids were all unsupervised, and no one said that was problem), then plead biological determinism. To me, morality is about how communities react to transgressions. "Ought not to" has no utility outside of consequences. Those may be social, like the experience of shame, to physical, like imprisonment. I think discussing morality as being solely a quality within individual agents is a dead end.
And thanks for starting this discussion. This is the type of rationality that I find not just interesting but important.
That strikes me as a low bar. Would you disastrously subvert someone else's utility function to majorly increase yours?
Well stated. And I would further add that there are issues with significant minority interests that staunchly disagree with majority opinion. Take the debates on homosexual marriage or abortion. The various sides have such different viewpoints that there isn't a common ground where any agreeably objective position can be reached. The "we all agree mass murder is wrong" is a cop out, because it implies all moral questions are that black and white. And even then, if it's such a universal moral, why does it happen in the first place? In the brain based morality model, I can say Dennis Rader's just a substantially different brain. With universal morality, you're stuck with the problem of people knowing something is wrong, but doing it anyway.
I've done the core sequences and the quantum physics one. I'd probably be up for something like this. I'm a bit on the time challenged side though. What type of schedule were you thinking of?
"or an Aaron from Less Wrong who figured it'd be silly to have a conversation about being personal while using a pseudonym?"
That one :)
I read Donne at my dad's funeral. I don't know how many countless times he quoted "For whom the bell tolls" (Meditaiton 17), but everyone recognized it when I read it. That actually isn't the line that stands out for me now, though. "Any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind" carries a lot of impact for me. My dad's death just made me more aware in general, I think, of just how big of an impact an individual's life has on the people around them.
Yeah, I think we're on the same page with people getting to know each other in groups. I was actually surprised and humbled by seeing how much my friends truly cared about me.
I'm not the filking Aaron, just the lurking one :) We haven't met, it's just that I didn't feel like just using my nickname when the conversation got more serious.
I don't know how to put it exactly, but the Christian funeral seems to be about a direct denial of what is obviously an emotionally devastating event. I grew up Catholic, and served as an altar boy at funerals, and it was just the same formula repeated over and over. I'm sure you're not the only one who was there who didn't believe the story, you were just being honest about your emotions. That's why I think communities really help. Sorry I don't have any recommendations on putting one together with a busy schedule.
I'd like to thank you for sharing your story as well. It was one of the things that prompted me to post (I was concerned this subject might be too off topic for LW). I do hope you find success in finding a community you can be yourself in.
Thanks. And I did read that post from EY. I found it pretty enlightening about who he is a person. It was a very moving piece.
That's something I really learned from my dad's life. He was an electron microscopist, and I believe he did some great, if unheralded, work in his lifetime. I believe doing good work in general, in any number of different fields, can add to the general good in the world. Add to that loving people you have in your life, anyone has tremendous potential for adding to the good of the world.
Raemon,
The quote you gave was very insightful, and to me underscores why you need communities. You need to take time getting to know people; no one normally just bares their soul the first time they meet someone new. The whole group doesn't have to be ready for that, or even intend it. The bonds just form naturally (hugging can help that).
I think that death and mourning is like everything else, in that religious language and viewpoints have been the only game in town for the longest time. Like that essay you mentioned (do you have a link), some of it can be very beautiful. But the "end", so to speak, is always saccharine, and doesn't really speak to the truth of the intense emotions surrounding ones loss.
Thanks for that poem, too. Is there commonly used music for it?
Aaron (oh, and I'm Aaron btw)
Thanks Isparrish. It was pretty hard to get all of that out. Your grandmother's funeral sermon sounds like so many other funerals that I've attended. The need to pretend death out of existence just seems so central to what religious approaches to death are all about. The other side of it, saying that death is exactly what it seems, feels so daunting. The fact that their memories lives on can feel flimsy, even if it is absolutely true. I don't have a neat and clean method of dealing with grief, but preserving those memories for yourself I believe is integral, or at least it was for me.
I thank Tony for not taking the immediately self-benefiting path of profit and instead doing his small part to raise the sanity waterline.
Shokwave's read on this is my take away from experiments like Milgram's: the situational context is not truly separable from character. Zimbardo's book The Lucifer Effect really drove this point home to me. He argued strongly against the idea that the abuses at Abu Ghriab were the result of "bad apples" (i.e. result of people with poor character), but that the situation itself led to the abuses, and further (and more controversially), the situation itself was created in order to bring about those behaviors. I don't mean to say that there is necessarily only one behavioral outcome for a given situation, only that the situation weighs very heavily on the outcome, to the point where finding an unchangeable "character" across situations doesn't seem feasible.
Sounds like there should just be a Bethesda meetup for the people that can't make the Baltimore one :)
The Shady Grove station is the end of the Red Line, one stop past the Rockville station going north. Union Station is on the Red Line as well, if you were going into town to meet Benquo for a ride, or take the train. Going south, its two stops past the Gallery Place - Chinatown stop.
This area is really difficult to arrange meetups, it seems, despite the close proximity mileage wise. The DC and Baltimore gravity wells really slow down travel times. I've been idly thinking of suggesting Terrapin Adventures as an outing ( http://www.terrapinadventures.com/ , located in Savage, MD). but I just don't know if people would be able to make it, due to things like available public transportation. Anyway, hope this meetup is successful, and spawns meetings in DC, Howard, Montgomery, etc.
This is my viewpoint as a philosophical laymen. I've liked a lot of the philosophy I've read, but I'm thinking about what the counter-proposal to what your post might be, and I don't know that it wouldn't result in a better state of affairs. I don't believe we'd have to stop reading writers from prior eras, or keep reinventing the wheel for "philosophical" questions. But why not just say, from here on out, the useful bits of philosophy can be categorized into other disciplines, and the general catch all term is no longer warranted? Philosophy covered just too wide a swath of topics: political science/economics, physics/cosmology, and psychology, just to name a few. I don't really know how to categorize everything Leibnitz and Newton were interested in. Now that these topics have more empirical data, there's less room for general speculation like there was in the old days. When you reclassify the useful stuff of philosophers' work as science, math, or logic I think it's very clarifying. All that remains afterwards (in my opinion) is more cultural commentaries and criticisms, and general speculations about life. I wouldn't call them useless; I found Rawls and Nozick to be interesting. But there would be big picture thinkers, cross-disciplinary studiers, and other types of thinkers even without a formal academic discipline called philosophy.
The RomCom version of Kick Ass would probably do very well at the box office.
Considering the source was Nature, I doubt your analysis is correct. The researchers are from Ludwig-Maximilians-University and ETH Zürich, which appear to be respectable institutions. I found a write-up at Science Daily (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100727082652.htm) that provides some more details on the research. From that link:
"The teams at LMU and the ETH Zurich have now shown that the result of a measurement on a quantum particle can be predicted with greater accuracy if information about the particle is available in a quantum memory. Atoms or ions can form the basis for such a quantum memory.
The researchers have, for the first time, derived a formula for Heisenberg's Principle, which takes account of the effect of a quantum memory. In the case of so-called entangled particles, whose states are very highly correlated (i.e. to a degree that is greater than that allowed by the laws of classical physics), the uncertainty can disappear.
According to Christandl, this can be roughly understood as follows "One might say that the disorder or uncertainty in the state of a particle depends on the information stored in the quantum memory. Imagine having a pile of papers on a table. Often these will appear to be completely disordered -- except to the person who put them there in the first place."
This is one of the very few places online that I've seen thoughtful discussion on the implications of quantum mechanics, so I felt research that could impact quantum theory would be relevant.
I came across a blurb on Ars Technica about "quantum memory" with the headline proclaiming that it may "topple Heisenberg's uncertainty principle". Here's the link: http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/08/quantum-memory-may-topple-heisenbergs-uncertainty-principle.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss
They didn't source the specific article, but it seems to be this one, published in Nature Physics. Here's that link: http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphys1734.html
This is all well above my paygrade. Is this all conceptual? Are the scientists involed anywhere near an experiment to verify any of this? In a word, huh?
Sounds good to me (that's what I get for typing quickly at work).
That's a good point, Dan. I guess we'd have to check what the number of base 10 systems were vs. overall systems. Though I would continue to see that as again demonstrating an evolution of complex number theory, as multiple strands joined together as systems interacted with one another. There were probably plenty of historical accidents at work, like you mention, to help bring about the current system of natural numbers.