Archive for February, 2021

BOOKWORMS ARE IT!

February 22, 2021

The biggest fallacy in Education is that because you have a degree you are ‘Educated’; the second biggest that because you have not, you are not. I argue here that a bookworm may become more than 500 times more learned than a graduate .

Thinking of all kinds works through “The Association of Ideas” . Thus a new idea is valuable in proportion to the number of ideas in your head already, with which you can associate it, potentially leading to new insights. Thus the value of reading a new book is roughly proportional to the number you have read already. If you have read 100 say there are roughly 100 times 99 (divided by 2 to avoid double-counting) or roughly 5000 potential Associations to be made between them whereas if you have read 200 that number rises to 200 times 199 (divided by 2) or roughly 20,000. In general then the value of your knowledge lies in proportion to the number of Associations you can make, which rises with the Square of its size. This is a profound but unfamiliar truth, and the basis of my argument.

Now a typical university undergraduate will need to read something like 2 books/course, which comes to between 100 and 200 over an entire degree. A book-worm on the other hand, who reads 2 books every week, reads 2 times 52 times 50 or roughly 5000 books over the course of 50 years. Taking the above-mentioned Square into account that implies that the bookworm finishes up (5000/200) squared, or 625 times more learned than a graduate; which makes my point.

There are of course qualifications. If the bookworm reads only detective novels, or the undergraduate only critiques of Shakespeare plays, neither will become Learned. Some breadth is assumed, the more the better. I would guess most bookworms, because they have no imposed constrictions on their appetites, would be more widely read, generally, but not always , reinforcing the case.

Isn’t that surprising, and interesting? The most learned members of society are not university graduates, not even university professors (of which I am one), but possibly unqualified people who have always got their noses in a book.

What are we to make of all this? I would suggest:

One has no chance of becoming Learned unless one is a life-long bookworm, degree or not.

It must be a primary aim of both parents and educators to see that their charges become bookworms.

A great library in every suburb and school will be an indispensable measure of its Civilization.

All measures which curb or kill Natural Human Curiosity( the main driver of reading), such as bad teaching, or over-examining, must be curbed immediately before it causes life-long damage. What on Earth is the point of turning out qualified but unlearned graduates?

There will be plenty of critics of ‘unfocussed reading’, of mere ‘bookworming’, especially from the Academic professions. All I can say is that I haven’t come to my view lightly. Having made a twenty year study of how successful Science is done, I found it was Breadth that mattered, far more then ‘genius’, for which there was little evidence. Breakthroughs appeared to come mainly from those who could Associate ideas which previously appeared to have no connection. For instance the basis of the modern world is Electro-magnetic Radiation , a concept only born when Hans Christian Oersted (1820), reading about storms at sea, first realised that Electricity and Magnetism must be connected.. If you want to follow the argument you might read my book “Thinking for Ourselves” described elsewhere on this site (under ‘My books’ Category). Here is an excerpt from that book entitled ‘THE VALUE OF LEARNING:

https://mjdisney.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/ValueLearning.pdf

So here’s to readers everywhere! Only you can become truly Learned , and capable of leading, or perhaps we should say ‘reading’, our way on up to new realms of thought…

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BIG BANG COSMOLOGY IS WRONG

February 20, 2021

If you wanted to know what to think of some fringe activity such as Spiritualism or Water Divining I doubt one would consult a professional first. After all you know that they must be committed. But what if you wanted to evaluate Big Bang Cosmology? Once again you can’t turn to the biased professionals, although they might argue that unless you are a professional you cannot know enough about the subject to take an informed position. But of course that is a dangerous stance to adopt, and the way in which priesthoods germinate, metastasize and sometimes come to dominate the world. They become immune to criticism because they will admit none but believers as critics. They become malignant, if not necessarily malign.

So what is the wise outsider to do? I would suggest they might consult those whose business it is to know much about the arcane subject- material in question without having to become paid exponents themselves. Cosmology for instance is in practice largely extra-galactic astronomy, so why not consult an extra-galactic astronomer who doesn’t claim to be a Cosmologist? Such an astronomer will know most of the technical arguments – without having to commit to them. That is where I stand with regard to Big Bang Cosmology, or BBC. My passion lies in Galaxies, the largest discrete objects in the Universe. But as they seem to be almost as old as the Cosmos, their origin must be entangled in the early evolution of the Universe itself, so I cannot ignore Cosmology, any more than Cosmology can ignore Galaxies which, so far as we know, comprise most of everything we can actually observe. And as visible galaxies exist in hundreds of thousands of millions, and can be observed in some detail nowadays, they should tell us more about Cosmology than vice-versa. And here is the rub: in BBC galaxies shouldn’t exist. As has been known for fifty years they would have been torn apart by radiation pressure before they could even form. So a desperate fix called CDM, standing for ‘Cold Dark Matter’ was adopted to try and repair the awful hole in the story. But despite many efforts to find out what it is, no one has been able to find any trace of CDM in half a century. Umm.

And there is another stark confrontation between galaxies and Cosmology. In an expanding Universe – the core assumption of BBC – distant galaxies should be totally invisible because of the ‘Tolman Effect’, a test for Expansion, which goes back to 1930. Then we didn’t possess the the telescopes to test it, but now, in the Hubble Space Telescope, we certainly do. And what do we find? That the observed Universe fails – and fails most dramatically – as you can see for yourself. Look at the figure:

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field, the deepest image of the Universe , taken with the Hubble Space Telescope, which I helped to design. All those tiny dots are actually high redshift galaxies a long long way away. If the Universe is really expanding we shouldn’t be able to see them. But……..

You can see it’s covered all over with a rash of tiny high-redshift galaxies – which simply shouldn’t be there, not if the Universe is expanding. If it was they ought to look no less than ten thousand times dimmer than they appear to be. Surely this is something BB Cosmologists ought to acknowledge? But they don’t. It’s been known since 1993 when we first fixed the telescope’s aberrated mirror, but ever since there has been a conspiracy of silence about the matter. As a designer of the existing and earlier cameras, I was staggered when I first saw the earliest deep Hubble images because I’d been assured by Cosmologists that Hubble would never see high-redshift galaxies. Yet there they were. There they are in their hundreds and thousands.

The only precedent I can think of occurred back in 1610 when Galileo pointed his little spyglass at Venus and found it to be a brilliant crescent pointing towards the Sun. The two-thousand-year-old Geocentric picture of the Cosmos was quite wrong, All the Planets, including the Earth, must be orbiting the Sun.

But what happened? Galileo was eventually seized by the Inquisition, forced to retract, and then imprisoned for life.

We don’t have an Inquisition any more but we do have Priests of a different kind: experts whose livelihoods, reputations and ambitions enforce adherence to a certain dogma. It’s not easy when you are an elderly, respected professor of Cosmology, with several books and hundreds of peer-reviewed papers behind you, to admit that you have been wasting yours, and everybody else’s time. And if the old won’t recant, why should the young, who still have their reputations and their livings to make? There is no Inquisition it is true but there are, in a highly competitive profession, appointment and tenure committees to please, journal-referees to propitiate. Brave myths to the contrary, academic success is based above all on allegiance to the Common Book of Prayer.

I know it will be hard for outsiders to believe in such conformity, I certainly wouldn’t have believed in it myself if I hadn’t experienced it at first hand, and to some extent colluded rather shamefully in it myself. Yes I went to conferences and politely pointed out the anomalies facing us in the sky. I even published papers in elite journals like ‘Nature’ demonstrating that real galaxies couldn’t possibly have formed in the CDM manner proclaimed by cosmological theorists. But when nobody responded, shouldn’t I have bellowed and trumpeted my doubts?

Honestly I should. But two things held me back; lack of self -confidence for one. Cosmology is a huge and complex subject mired in the hardest Mathematics and Physics – and perhaps I’d missed something – which the experts had not? Then again it wasn’t my real love. If I acquired a reputation as a madman I wouldn’t get the observing time on top telescopes I absolutely needed to do my Galaxy research. Many of us subscribe to popular myths, knowing them to be untrue. One well-known colleague told me that when he is applying for observing time he always alludes to CDM, which he knows to be diseased, because he’s found that if does not, he won’t get the time. And so CDM, a central dogma of BBC, continues alive, when it is so obviously wrong.

But enough of personal anguish and Sociology. How could the uncommitted thinker look dispassionately at the arguments for and against BBC and come to a balanced opinion?

There is a way – using Common Sense – if you know how it works – which most scientists, let alone other scholars, do not. All it will deliver is a provisional conclusion, with some kind of Odds on it attached. What I will do next is to exhibit two different attempts of mine to have a go at the BBC problem, so that readers can appreciate some of the philosophical subtleties involved.

The first, entitled “Doubts about Big Bang Cosmology” was published back in 2011, where my Odds against it being broadly right were only 4 to 1, disappointing, but hardly decisive. It is reasonably short yet contains the main arguments in a not too technical fashion I hope, so readers may care to see how those Odds were reached. You can find it at

https://mjdisney.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Doubtsbigbang-copy.pdf

In cosmology itself nothing much changed dramatically over the next 4 years. But my understanding of Common Sense did when, in 2015, I stumbled upon the vitally important PAW or ‘Principal of Animal Wisdom’, indispensable to all thinkers who might otherwise be blown wildly off course by Systematic Errors. Now my Odds against BBC shot up dramatically to 128 to 1 against it being broadly right. Not only are they far more conclusive but they are , in my opinion , far more robust too because they rely on a whole network of interlocking and broadly concordant evidence. Without any need to repeat the cosmological arguments the new Inference Table, with its condemning Odds O(H|E) {i.e Odds on the Hypothesis H given all the evidence E} is briefly exhibited at

https://mjdisney.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/SCAMBBCTable-copy.docx

The conclusion I would draw from all this is that the Universe is trying to tell us something profound and interesting about itself, but we professionals, soaked in our preconceptions, and deafened by our Church choir, are unprepared to listen. After Galileo’s experience we should have anticipated, and some of us on board the Hubble did. But ….

Our susceptibility to misconceptions lies in our weak grasp of Common Sense today, and in particular our total ignorance of PAW, or The Principle of Animal Wisdom. Animals whose very survival depends on sound judgements, cannot afford to be taken in by misleading clues. So how do they discount them? That was the question I asked myself back in 2015. The answer is they cannot allow any single clue a predominating Weight – because that clue might be false, and fatal. They must rely on a network of weaker clues which reinforce one another. That is what I call PAW. And when I apply it to BBC the Odds against it shoot dramatically up. BBC can’t be right, it can’t. Something at least about it is deeply wrong, never mind the technical details. [To see more on the PAW go to Post ‘ANIMAL WISDOM & US’ in ‘Thinking’ Category].

If the PAW is so damned vital for animals then how did we ever lose sight of it? Because Priests preach Certainties – their influence, their power and their livelihoods all depend on proclaiming Certainties, whilst the PAW stands out firmly against them. And, to be fair, many of us prefer Certainties to uncomfortable uncertainty – which is all the natural world has to offer. So over the last few thousand years the PAW, which is grown-up, has become submerged by a childish and misbegotten craving for Certainty, which only priests, but not men of Common Sense, can deliver. As Voltaire put it: “Uncertainty is uncomfortable; Certainty is absurd.” See a talk on Youtube by me on this topic at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KskJrJmfr34

What IS the universe trying to tell us ? It could be exciting.

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ANIMAL WISDOM & US

February 20, 2021

Every organism evolves to survive, but Evolution is an extremely slow process. That means that if we can think before we act (a distinct survival advantage) then so could our animal forbears. And modern studies of animal behaviour confirm that their mental sophistication is far higher than zoologists of any earlier generation could suppose1.

Life out in the wild can be extremely dangerous, so survivors (especially if they come from a potentially long-lived species, as we do) cannot afford to make unwise decisions. Caution must be their watchword.

We have elsewhere argued2 that decisions are reached using the Detective’s Equation (DE):

Revised Odds on H = Old Odds on H × (Weight of Clue 1)

× (Weight of Clue 2) ×………… and so on, for as many clues as you have.

in which the Weights are just numbers we attach to each clue as it bears on the particular Hypothesis H (e.g. ‘It is safe to try and catch that snake’) that we are trying to evaluate.

The great value of the DE is that it is multiplicative, so high Odds can be reached from only a few clues. But what if one of those clues, or our evaluation of it, is wrong? For instance that the tasty looking snake is not harmless but venomous. Such misapprehensions occur all the time, so we must have some mechanism for discounting them. An obvious possibility is insisting on the equivalent of at least three heavily weighted clues in favour before deciding. Why 3? Because one rotten plus one good could lead to fatal consequences, whereas with 3 strong clues one could hope that at least two would generally be sound.

But at what Odds would one feel it safe to decide? I would suggest at combined Odds of something better than 50 to 1 (for or against). Now the smallest whole number, which multiplied together 3 times, comes to more than 50 is 4 because 4 × 4 × 4 = 64 . That suggests (no more) that the highest Weight we should put upon any single clue is 4. And if two weak clues are equivalent to one strong that suggests weak clues should be given a Weight of 2 because 2 × 2 =4.

To the sophisticated statistician all this may seem very crude, but the truth is, in the real world we cannot put precise Weights on many vital clues, for instance on our assessments of say honesty or guilt or venomousness.

So we have a very crude suggestive scheme for making judgements using the DE, in which the ONLY permitted Weights are:

Weight

‘Strongly in favour’ = 4

‘Weakly in favour’ = 2

‘Neutral’ = 1

‘Weakly Against’ = ½

‘Strongly Against’ = ¼

which is, so far, only suggestive. The only real justification for this scheme , (which I call the ‘Principle of Animal Wisdom’ or PAW) will be its performance in practice.

At this point we need to step back and recall that, so far as we know, animals don’t count. So isn’t all this numerising pointless when we are looking back to animal decision-making as our exemplar? Not really, because 4’s and 2’s only stand in for Categories of Clue, “Strongly for”, “Weakly For”, “Weakly against”(1/2) and so on. Nor do we need that ‘50- to-1’, because all we were demanding was ‘At least the equivalent of 3 strong clues (net) before deciding, one way or the other. In other words, to reach wise decisions, we don’t need , nor do animals, to use any numbers at all, we can simply use CATEGORICAL INFERENCE instead (which is described in another Post3). But as we humans are familiar with simple numbers and simple Odds we might as well stick to 4’s, 2’s, ½’ s and so on.

It’s very difficult (as it was originally for me) for modern Scientists and Statisticians to imagine that anything as crude as PAW could play any useful role in modern thinking. However the more one uses it in practice, and thinks about its implications, the more convincing, and indeed profound, the PAW comes to seem.

History shows that progress in Science has often been completely halted by unsound conceptions, or ‘Systematic Errors’ as we label them. For instance:

The Earth is Flat

The heavens revolve around the Earth

The body is controlled by 4 Humours

The world is far too young for Evolution

Continents can’t move.

Child-bed fever is a natural part of birth.

Radio waves cannot possible girdle the globe.

Nothing can live in the Deep

Atoms are immutable

…..and so on.

Had we, instead of ceding them prime authority, given them low (i.e. PAW) Weights we might have progressed much faster.

Then again, carefully consider the definition of a Weight in Probability terms, which we have elsewhere4:

Weight of Clue = (Probability of Clue IF H is true) divided by ( Probability of Clue if some hypothesis other than H is responsible for it).

In an OPEN world, as opposed to a card game [CLOSED], this last Probability can never be zero because there are so many ‘other thans‘, indeed an infinite number. It follows that no Weight should ever be set very high; i.e. the PAW

We can see that very high, or very low Weights can almost never be justified because they require an assumption about “ all those hypotheses, apart from H, which could give rise to E”. But in an OPEN world, as opposed to a card game, those other hypotheses could be virtually infinite in number. Thus the profession of Statistics , with its 4-figure precise tables, has fooled itself into the belief that it is dealing with a real open world, when all it is doing is playing card-games (which are CLOSED).

But it’s only when one employs the PAW to deal with complex issues like Big Bang Cosmology that its true value shines out. Some of our conceptions about the Universe are probably wrong – but we don’t know which ones (Expansion?). But if we combine enough clues together, the unsound ones, because of PAW, won’t be able to twist the whole picture and obscure the truth. For instance I used to believe that the Big Bang picture, although it looked implausible, couldn’t be ruled out. But after I stumbled upon the PAW (2015) and applied it to the Big Bang, the Odds came out very firmly (128 to 1 ) against. That illustrates, somewhat surprisingly, that the PAW, even with its weak Weights, can actually be more decisive than the alternatives.(See our Post ‘BIG BANG COSMOLOGY IS WRONG’ under the ‘Astronomy’ Category, or click on the url below)

Science is of course only one application of a survival mechanism which is tens, probably hundreds of millions of years old. But humans, who are so easily persuaded by Culture, that is to say by ideas planted in their heads by others, need to understand and employ PAW even more assiduously today to preserve themselves from monsters employing modern media. Here is a short list of such CULTURAL MYTHS:

  1. God is naturally on our side.
  2. You shouldn’t mind sacrificing your life because you will be rewarded in paradise.
  3. There is a Hell awaiting, but if you pay us we will see you are spared the tortures of…..
  4. We ………s have a Divine Right to rule.
  5. The (other side) are evil and must be crushed.
  6. They’re savages; they don’t feel pain like we do.
  7. Education is good for you and for everyone.
  8. Our little father the Czar/ Stalin/ Mao….. will look after us.
  9. Newspaper proprietors have the best interests of their readers at heart.
  10. If you work hard you’ll get more stuff and that will make you happier.
  11. Our religion is the right one. Those others are blasphemers and heretics.
  12. All things bright and beautiful,….the Good God made them all.
  13. They’re only aborigines /gypsies ….If you gave them land they wouldn’t know what to do with it.
  14. Doctors/Lawyers/Professors/Managers …. can’t do their jobs properly unless they have much bigger houses and cars than you and I.
  15. Women are too emotional to drive vehicles.
  16. You can rely on the Government news channels.
  17. Anyone who criticises our Great Leader is a traitor.
  18. It’s our land; God gave it to us.
  19. Education is good for you.
  20. They’ve got Weapons of Mass Destruction.
  21. Education is good for you.

Oppressive regimes, knowing our susceptibility to propaganda, employ myth-makers to exploit us, impoverish us, and even kill us fighting their wars. That’s what priests, newspapers, propaganda ministries and PR firms are for. Thus the Pharaohs had priests who spread the lie that they were Gods who controlled the Sun and The Moon. Thus the Romans authorised the Christian Church to control Europe for over a thousand years. Thus Hitler whipped up the Germans into a thirst for revenge. Thus Big Business funds Think-tanks, News channels, and lobbying groups. And so on.

There is another way of looking at the matter. If one can set an arbitrarily high Weight on some particular Clue you can use it to ‘Win’ any argument. Thus it is ideal for Priests and Tyrants. But the PAW democratises Thinking. It makes all the different Clues and arguments which go towards reaching a Conclusion, almost, but not quite equal.

There is no such thing as Certainty in the real (OPEN) world. We all of us, whether we are seagulls or Professors of Computer Science, must navigate our way through life as best we can using the Balance of Probabilities. And to do so successfully the PAW is absolutely fundamental. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a Priest. And I cannot think of a worse charge.

If you really want to see how all this Animal Wisdom works out in practice click on;

https://mjdisney.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/scamsmv5.pdf

References.

1“Are we smart enough to realise how smart animals are”? Frans de Waal, 2016; Granta Books.

2 See Post here ‘HOW COMMON SENSE WORKS’ under ‘Thinking’ category or ref. 4 below, Chapter 5.

3 See my post ‘CATEGORICAL INFERENCE’ under Thinking Category

4 See Chapter 4 in my book Thinking for Ourselves (Amazon 2020) .It’s described elsewhere on this site under the My books Category

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