What is the Threshold of Intolerable Miraculousness?

Status
Not open for further replies.
DaveC426913 said:
Those two words don't even make sense together.
What does it mean for a miracle to be "intolerable"? What do you do - send it to its room?
Click to expand...

Makes perfect sense

ALL (ANY) miracles would be intolerable as they would go against Science and no Scientist would be able to work

IF they ever happened

Since they NEVER happen we can tolerate them

Or more precisely we tolerate and are quite happy by their absence

:)
 
Eugene Shubert said:
So if a self-replicating molecular machine A produces a mutated self-replicating molecular machine B such that, in its self-replicating process, two base pairs of B’s DNA gets transposed, then you regard it as a mathematical impossibility for the same two base pairs of B to get transposed again, in the next iteration of self-replication, which would be an evolution back to the original molecular machine A.
Click to expand...
Not every characteristic of an organism base pair sequences included, is the result of an evolutionary process adaptation. This is a common misconception about how evolution works. This is the misconception you are using when you suggest that something like an oak tree (a huge multicellular plant) could somehow adapt itself to become a primate, or a homonid primate (the most complex animal on the planet). To do that, you would need to have millions of generations of growth, and a lot longer for this to happen than the original 4 billion years. It always takes longer to tear something down and rebuild it than to build from scratch.
 
Eugene Shubert said:
It means an event so fantastically improbable, yet so perfectly consistent with all the fundamental laws of physics, that it makes most religiously devote atheists squirm. See, for example, the punchline to chapter 9 of MR TOMPKINS IN WONDERLAND by the prominent physicist George Gamow. (The book title is a link).
Click to expand...

At this time, and even more so in the future, there are cameras everywhere

So I would expect to see a boiling glass of ice water on YouTube any time soon

I would even settle for The Rapture or the dead arising (nar who could be bothered see The Living Dead again)

I ain't squirming yet

:)
 
Last edited:
billvon said:
Correct. That's two base pairs. Now extend that to three billion.
Click to expand...
If the probability for a specific transposition of two base pairs in a genome of three billion is p, then the probability for the undoing of that transposition in the next iteration is also p.
 
The premise is (it seems) "when is a set of circumstances so improbable that 'God did it' is more probable that that those circumstances occurred by coincidence?".

"God did it" is always going to be more improbable.

Man isn't good with probabilities naturally. We are good with pattern recognition and not so good with probabilities.

We usually overestimate the odds and (as was pointed out above) aren't aware of the law of very large numbers....someone wins the lottery every day, someone is being struck twice by lightening as well speak.

The Birthday Paradox shows us that it only takes 25 people to be invited to a party for it to be more likely than not that two people will have the same birthday.

Part of that problem is that people don't correctly understand the actual question. However most uncommon situations are more common than most people realize.

Someone will correctly predict the next World Series winner. It's much less likely that we can tell who that will be ahead of time.
 
Seattle said:
The Birthday Paradox shows us that it only takes 25 people to be invited to a party for it to be more likely than not that two people will have the same birthday.
Click to expand...

I had a party once with 25 people including myself

There was 24 people there who shared the same Birthday with another person at the party

Yes

The Society of Research into twins

fund raising Teddy Bears picnic was a great success

:)
 
Michael 345 said:
I had a party once with 25 people including myself

There was 24 people there who shared the same Birthday with another person at the party

Yes

The Society of Research into twins

fund raising Teddy Bears picnic was a great success

:)
Click to expand...
Did you feel that it was intolerably improbable? It sounds like perhaps it was tolerable? :)
 
Seattle said:
The premise is (it seems) "when is a set of circumstances so improbable that 'God did it' is more probable that that those circumstances occurred by coincidence?".

"God did it" is always going to be more improbable.

Man isn't good with probabilities naturally. We are good with pattern recognition and not so good with probabilities.

We usually overestimate the odds and (as was pointed out above) aren't aware of the law of very large numbers....someone wins the lottery every day, someone is being struck twice by lightening as well speak.

The Birthday Paradox shows us that it only takes 25 people to be invited to a party for it to be more likely than not that two people will have the same birthday.

Part of that problem is that people don't correctly understand the actual question. However most uncommon situations are more common than most people realize.

Someone will correctly predict the next World Series winner. It's much less likely that we can tell who that will be ahead of time.
Click to expand...

More than 40 times, I've been in a room with more than 30 people & asked them to write their birthdays on paper & hand them to me. Only once were any 2 the same.

Who did this & got significantly different results???

<>
 
StrangerInAStrangeLa said:
More than 40 times, I've been in a room with more than 30 people & asked them to write their birthdays on paper & hand them to me. Only once were any 2 the same.

Who did this & got significantly different results???

<>
Click to expand...

You have to understand the actual question and the actual results. If you were to ask a group of people, "how large a group would you need for two people to have the same birthday?", you would get answers ranging from several hundred to several thousand.

Some people would understand the situation as having one person with a specific birthday and then would be trying to guess how many people you would need to match that specific birthday.

That's not the question. The question involves any two matching birthdays. Therefore it's a certainty once you invite 366 people since there are only 365 unique days.

The 25 number is when the probability becomes greater than 50% so .51 since it's technically more likely than not at that point. To get to the 99% probability level I think the number is 85 people or something like that.

Another area where people aren't good with properly accessing probability is when someone seems to predict more than it would seem likely that one could predict.

Take a large room of people and ask everyone to answer a random "yes or no" question. Maybe half the room gets it right. Ask just the people who got it right to answer another "yes or no" question. Eventually if you keep going you will end up with just one person and that person will have guessed right maybe 10 times in a row.

That sounds amazing or "beyond coincidence". That person must have ESP right?

Of course not. One person in every room will get more questions in a row correct than everyone else.

It would be amazing if you could predict beforehand who that person would be. It would be amazing if that one person could continue to do this but that's not what is happening.

If you do this "experiment" again, in that same room, someone else will be the "amazing" one.
 
Seattle said:
You have to understand the actual question and the actual results. If you were to ask a group of people, "how large a group would you need for two people to have the same birthday?", you would get answers ranging from several hundred to several thousand.

Some people would understand the situation as having one person with a specific birthday and then would be trying to guess how many people you would need to match that specific birthday.

That's not the question. The question involves any two matching birthdays. Therefore it's a certainty once you invite 366 people since there are only 365 unique days.

The 25 number is when the probability becomes greater than 50% so .51 since it's technically more likely than not at that point. To get to the 99% probability level I think the number is 85 people or something like that.

Another area where people aren't good with properly accessing probability is when someone seems to predict more than it would seem likely that one could predict.

Take a large room of people and ask everyone to answer a random "yes or no" question. Maybe half the room gets it right. Ask just the people who got it right to answer another "yes or no" question. Eventually if you keep going you will end up with just one person and that person will have guessed right maybe 10 times in a row.

That sounds amazing or "beyond coincidence". That person must have ESP right?

Of course not. One person in every room will get more questions in a row correct than everyone else.

It would be amazing if you could predict beforehand who that person would be. It would be amazing if that one person could continue to do this but that's not what is happening.

If you do this "experiment" again, in that same room, someone else will be the "amazing" one.
Click to expand...

I understood the question as you put it. Then you changed it.

<>
 
StrangerInAStrangeLa said:
I understood the question as you put it. Then you changed it.

<>
Click to expand...
No, I didn't. I said...

"The Birthday Paradox shows us that it only takes 25 people to be invited to a party for it to be more likely than not that two people will have the same birthday."

More likely than not is reached at anything greater than 50% probability and that is reached with 25 people.
 
Eugene Shubert said:
It means an event so fantastically improbable, yet so perfectly consistent with all the fundamental laws of physics, that it makes most religiously devote atheists squirm. See, for example, the punchline to chapter 9 of MR TOMPKINS IN WONDERLAND by the prominent physicist George Gamow. (The book title is a link).
Click to expand...
Thank you, Eugene, for providing a link to Gamow's "Mr Tompkins" book.

Chapter 9 is the one about entropy and Maxwell's Demon. The punchline to this is that Maud knows the drink "spontaneously" separating into boiling and freezing parts only does so as a result of Maxwell's Demon swatting individual molecules with a special tennis racquet. By doing this, he redirects fast-moving molecules one way and slow-moving ones another. (In the process, he does work on the system, as the pump of a refrigerator also does.)

I'm unclear what lesson you think you draw from this.
 
Seattle said:
No, I didn't. I said...

"The Birthday Paradox shows us that it only takes 25 people to be invited to a party for it to be more likely than not that two people will have the same birthday."

More likely than not is reached at anything greater than 50% probability and that is reached with 25 people.
Click to expand...

Not going to argue back&forth on it.

Again, WHO supposedly did this & got different results?

<>
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top