Lou FCD
Posts: 5455
Joined: Jan. 2006
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| Quote (CeilingCat @ April 10 2011,23:26) | vjtorley continues to astound all readers with his thought processes: | Quote | Here’s the idea behind J. Richard Gott’s reasoning, in his own words:
In 1969, after graduating from Harvard but before starting further study in astro-physics at Princeton University, I took a summer holiday in Europe and visited the Berlin Wall. It was the height of the Cold War, and the wall was then eight years old. Standing in it ominous shadow, I began to wonder how long it would last. Having no special knowledge of East-West relations, I hadn’t much to go on. But I hit on a curious way to estimate the wall’s likely lifetime knowing only its age.
I reasoned, first of all, that there was nothing special about my visit. That is, I didn’t come to see the wall being erected or demolished–I just happened to have a holiday, and came to stand there at some random moment during the wall’s existence. So, I thought, there was a 50 per cent chance that I was seeing the wall during the middle two quarters of its lifetime (see Diagram, below). If I was at the beginning of this interval, then one-quarter of the wall’s life had passed and three-quarters remained. On the other hand, if I was at the end of of this interval, then three-quarters had passed and only one-quarter lay in the future. In this way I reckoned that there was a 50 per cent chance the wall would last from 1/3 to 3 times as long as it had already.
Before leaving the wall, I predicted to a friend, that it would with 50 per cent likelihood, last more than two and two-thirds years but less than 24. I then returned from holiday and went on to other things. But my prediction, and the peculiar line of reasoning that lay behind it, stayed with me. Twenty years later, in November 1989 the Berlin Wall cam down–unexpectedly, but in line with my prediction. |
So if you had happened to visit 19 years later, your estimate would have been?
vj says go here for more. |
He seems to have forgotten to read the rest of the article.
| Quote | Intrigued that the approach seemed to work, I eventually set out its logic in Nature(vol 363, p315, 1993). There, instead of using the 50 percent mark, I adopted the more standards scientific criterion that the prediction should have at least a 95 per cent chance of being correct. This makes the numbers in the formula come out a bit different, but the argument remains the same. If there is nothing special about your observation of something, then there is a 95 per cent chance that you are seeing it during the middle 95 per cent of its observable lifetime, rather than during the first or last 2.5 per cent (see Diagram, p 38). At one extreme the future is only 1/39 as long as the past. At the other, it is 39 times as long. With 95 per cent certainty, this fixes the future longevity of whatever you observe as being between 1/39 and 39 times as long as its past.
This formula can be used to amusing effect. Mathematicians Peter Landsberg, Jeff Dewynne and Colin Please of the University of Southhampton used it to predict how long the Britain's Conservative government would stay in power (Nature, vol. 365, p385, 1993). The Conservative Party had been in power for 14 years, and they estimated with 95 per cent confidence that it would be in power for at least 4.3 months but less than 546 more years. Sure enough the Conservative Party was ousted 3.5 years later. |
And of course vjtardbucket is missing the boat in that calculating how long reality will last might be a slightly inappropriate use of statistics in any event, not to mention that the fact that the mechanisms of evolution were described 150 years ago has fuck all to do with how long evolution has been going on.
Since evolution has been taking place for like 3,000,000,000 years, perhaps that would be a better starting place for your calculations, vj. A Grim Reckoning for IDiots indeed.
But what do I know? I got a C in Statistics.
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“Why do creationists have such a hard time with commas?
Linky“. ~ Steve Story, Legend
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