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Probably not that good of an article, but it actually exists, only at Wired, so it is certain that it probably is worth reading. But only if you go in with no preconceptions.
Nobel laureate Richard Feynman once asked his Caltech students to calculate the probability that, if he walked outside the classroom, the first car in the parking lot would have a specific license plate, say 6ZNA74. Assuming every number and letter are equally likely and determined independently, the students estimated the probability to be less than 1 in 17 million. When the students finished their calculations, Feynman revealed that the correct probability was 1: He had seen this license plate on his way into class. Something extremely unlikely is not unlikely at all if it has already happened.
Bayesian probability is all well and good, until it runs up against actuality. But the point here is all about having a Beautiful Mind or π, and seeing patterns everywhere, and how if you see them in Big Data, the patterns are bigger. But no less crazy.
The Feynman trap—ransacking data for patterns without any preconceived idea of what one is looking for—is the Achilles heel of studies based on data mining. Finding something unusual or surprising after it has already occurred is neither unusual nor surprising. Patterns are sure to be found, and are likely to be misleading, absurd, or worse.
This approach to "science" can certainly lead to interesting results, as in this particular study:
A standard neuroscience experiment involves showing a volunteer in an MRI machine various images and asking questions about the images. The measurements are noisy, picking up magnetic signals from the environment and from variations in the density of fatty tissue in different parts of the brain. Sometimes they miss brain activity; sometimes they suggest activity where there is none.
A Dartmouth graduate student used an MRI machine to study the brain activity of a salmon as it was shown photographs and asked questions. The most interesting thing about the study was not that a salmon was studied, but that the salmon was dead. Yep, a dead salmon purchased at a local market was put into the MRI machine, and some patterns were discovered. There were inevitably patterns—and they were invariably meaningless.
Brings to mind (brains!) a certain Irish myth of the Salmon of Knowledge, and the parallel formation of the posthumous Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams.
The problem has become endemic nowadays because powerful computers are so good at plundering Big Data. Data miners have found correlations between Twitter words or Google search queries and criminal activity, heart attacks, stock prices, election outcomes, Bitcoin prices, and soccer matches. You might think I am making these examples up. I am not.
There are even stronger correlations with purely random numbers. It is Big Data Hubris to think that data-mined correlations must be meaningful. Finding an unusual pattern in Big Data is no more convincing (or useful) than finding an unusual license plate outside Feynman's classroom.
New Myth: Big Data and the MRIed Dead Salmon of Pattern Imagination.
(Score: 2, Informative) by pTamok on Monday January 14 2019, @10:59AM (1 child)
What's the chance that the next coin I flip will come up heads? Conventionally we say it's 50/50, but in fact it's either 0 or 100. *We* just don't know which yet.
That depends on the coin. If it is an American nickel, the chance is about 1 in 6000 that it will land balanced on its edge. [harvard.edu] That means the conventional chances are about 5999/12000 heads, 5999/12000 tails, and 2/12000 edge.
With regard to 'we just don't know yet', if you believe in the 'many worlds' formulation of quantum mechanics*, then all possible outcomes of the coin toss happen, and we merely experience one of them in our history. Therefore there is a remarkably large number of 'we's, each of which has a different experience of the universe, as each has a different world line.
Alternatively, you can formulate a reasonable theory that out experience of time passing is simply a consequence of passing at constant speed along a fourth static dimension, all of which exists 'simultaneously', which has two consequences: first that all apparent possible changes are actually predetermined by the 4 dimensional static structure of the universe; secondly as a result of this predetermination, there is no such thing as free will. This approach is known as chronogeometric fatalism, or chronogeometric determinism.
The interpretation of Quantum Mechanics known as Pilot Wave Theory [wikipedia.org], or de Broglie-Bohm Theory [wikipedia.org] is deterministic, but controversial. I think most physicists tend to support the Copenhagen interpretation, or something similar which incorporate the Born rule, and therefore have probabilistic outcomes - in other words there is 'chance' in nature.
So at present, it appears it is possible to argue reasonably both for (in principle) being able to know the results of a coin toss in advance, or not. The mathemaical formulations of QM 'work' in the sense they describe the expected outcomes of experiments, and those descriptions are accurate. Interpreting the mathematics of QM is a subject of great debate.
Your original point suggests you would support a Bayensian interpretation of QM [wikipedia.org].
In the macroscopic world, if you flip an unbiased coin a sufficient number of times, you can be pretty certain that the proportion of heads to tails will be very close to 1:1 [askamathematician.com], even though the actual sequence of results can contain arbitrarily long sequences of solely heads or solely tails [sas.com].
*In some (highly selective) polls, a significant number of physicists choose this as their preferred interpretation of Quantum Mechanics [quora.com]. While it is not accepted by all QM physicists, it is 'respectable'.
(Score: 3, Informative) by PiMuNu on Monday January 14 2019, @03:38PM
> If it is an American nickel, the chance is about 1 in 6000 that it will land balanced on its edge.
FTFAbstract: "with randomized initial conditions"; it depends on the distribution of randomized initial conditions.
> Quantum mechanics [blah blah] and therefore have probabilistic outcomes
This is irrelevant, the probability that the coin toss is not determined by initial conditions is vanishingly small from quantum mechanics. A coin toss is essentially classical.