Ah. The devil is in the detail. This kind of oversimplification of any complex process causes totally misguided, yet confident beliefs to form. Which is why when one is trying to analyse/model systems of extreme complexity (engineering physics, markets , human psychology, weather etc), one must make it a point to consider almost all factors in question and absolutely avoid reaching premature conclusions. IMO, for certain things, the depth of understanding is much more important than the speed.
"Lazy oversimplifications" , like you mentioned, are the biggest hurdles in one's efforts to stay informed and knowledgeable. There simply is no substitute for reading the literature (for any subject) and spending long hours to process/conceptualize the information.
Nice read!
Indeed, but..
can we ever know all factors in question?
I believe truth is always limited due to this human shortcoming. One cannot simply know or be aware of all the constituents of a given situation.
True, I had even a written a post that touches on this a bit.
https://steemit.com/philosophy/@josephd/are-there-3-different-worlds-that-are-fundamentally-different
For computer programmes, such a thing is called "exhaustive testing" which is of course an impossible thing, (we test the validity of our programme with all possible inputs) but what i meant was to get closer and closer our "best" , which itself is a moving goalpost (think of an asymptotic curve). We can get to arbitrary levels of precision, but at some point, the efforts to increase in accuracy far outweighs the improvement in accuracy, then we may stop. Approximations closer to 100% probability are taken to be certain for all intents and purposes.
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Probabilities are all we have in physics too. For some reason, the word "probability" has a stigma associated with it among the lay people, especially when used in hard sciences.
They assume something is not "real" if it's not a 100% probability. Which is not a probability at all, but a truth, or a certainty.
But probabilities are really all that we have.
A good example of this is the state where all air molecules in your room may randomly move to one half of the room, leaving the other half empty, this is extremely dangerous, and may even kill you if the molecules don't spread across the entire room within seconds. There's no physical law preventing such a thing from happening. Just that it's probability is of the magnitude 10^{-23}, which is so low that it won't happen even in a time period of our universe's current age. So we don't worry about such things, even though it's possible in theory. The uncertainty in our knowledge is as close to zero as it gets.
Though I agree in most other cases, we cannot obtain near certain probabilities, however, 95% confidences limits are usually good enough for making decisions in most real world scenarios.
Unrelated: does steemit on phone (no app, just on browser) feel laggy as hell for everyone or is it just me? I know it's not my phone because everything else works fine.
Thanks!
Wonderful article. Really enjoyed it.
What concerns me more from this kind of approach is entropy — and specifically the second law of thermodynamics. If systems become evidently more and more complex how do we decipher things such as truth with accuracy?
yes. especially on android devices.
Glad you did, thanks!
Well, second law of thermodynamics says that the probability is exponentially large for the number of micro-states a given system can take to grow with time than it is to remain constant- or decrease.
Suppose we start with a bunch of air molecules in the center of a box, and observe what they do after some time. It is exceedingly unlikely that with time, they will stay occupying the same region, or get into a tighter bunch- in a smaller region. This simply will not happen because the number of ways in which the molecules may arrange themselves randomly throughout the box are way, way more than the number of ways in which an "exotic" configuration, like the one I described, can be attained.
Coming back to your point, yes systems do get increasingly complex due to entropy, but they also become much more well behaved than before - behaviour of a bunch of air molecules at the centre or corner of a box is extremely unpredictable (unstable), they may fluctuate in any random way , due to the high degree of freedom. They fluctuate to attain "stabler" configurations, configurations which prevent such massive fluctuations.