Re: Epistemology 201: The Science of Science

From: OsherD (mdoctorow_at_comcast.net)
Date: 02/18/05 

Date: 17 Feb 2005 16:15:06 -0800

>>From Osher Doctorow

Tony said:

>When you were talking at first about schools of probability vs.
>statistics as a method in QM, I found myself wondering what the
>difference really was

There is actually a difference besides the fact that the mathematical
tool of statistics
is probability. In fact, there are several differences, which go as
far as to partly
explain the inferior position of philosophers and mathematicians in the
economic
world of today. Statisticians basically arose as "concrete"
probability people
somewhat in the way that engineers are relative to physicists. In
fact, statisticians
are probability's "engineers", just as engineers are physics' "concrete
applications"
people. In one way this is good, but there was an unexpectedly bad
"side effect"
as computer programmers say. Or in sociological language, there was a
bad
"latent effect" besides the "good" manifest effect.

The good part was lots of practical inventions that Bob likes to talk
about or hint
about, which reminds me of Nixon telling the Russians that we were
ahead of them
because we had TVs. Tell that to the Dalai Lama! The bad part was
that when
any field develops concrete-oriented people, such as physics'
experimentalists
(and those guys really differ from theoretical physicists in mostly
being promoted
for experiments rather than some mixture of great theory and
experiment), there's
a slowdown in theory. That may not sound bad, but when we think about
Euclidean
geometry lasting for thousands of years when Non-Euclidean geometry and
all its
theoretical advantages (including general relativity, but by no means
limited to it)
ruled, dozens of generations of human beings can die before the next
great
theoretical advance. Politically, we become a nation of materialists,
priding
ourselves on TV sets and faster but dumb computers and faster
communication
with the same dull (or occasionally regular) people. Actually, we
become a world
of materialists. Flattening a TV monitor or screen becomes our goal
instead of
exploring the solar system and stars. Putting more data into a
computer becomes
our goal instead of breakthroughs in medical theory and psychology and
social
sciences and philosophy.

Surely I'm exaggerating? In fact, I'm understating it.
Statisticians, as opposed to
probabilists not employed by aerospace companies or government, "sold
out" to
a large extent to the highest bidder. They became imitators of physics
and
engineering rather than pioneers telling physicists and engineers where
to get off.
They accepted every little fad and nuance that physicists and engineers
and
incidentally computer scientists and AI people developed uncritically,
starting their
statistics from those fads as assumptions. That's the stuff of which
the Fall of
Rome was made. But it endears them to government and corporations,
which
really are fad-driven and there to guard Number One (themselves), and
new
theoretical breakthroughs be damned.

Einstein bought into the faddish statistical school. He used
statistics as a cover
for determinism, believe it or not. The advantage of using the word
"statistics" was
that it would appeal to Ingenious Imitators and the establishment, for
whom statistics
was anyway just a bunch of surveys and ways of eliminating experimenter
bias or
experimenter error. These type of statisticians don't really believe
that fluctuations
are real or have a pattern or even can be useful. They're out to
imitate the
determinists and eliminate fluctuations. Some fluctuations should be
eliminated.
But what gives us our Individuality and our Creative Genius are those
Rare
fluctuations, the tails of the probability curves which are studied in
Large Deviations
theory (important in Israel and now much of the world) and my Rare
Event Theory
and Probable Influence (PI) theory.

I'll try to continue this soon. Remind me if I forget.

Osher

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