Wednesday, August 5, 2015

Effective Mandela Theory


There are at least hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of people around the world who were shocked to hear that Nelson Mandela died recently.  Their shock wasn't that a world-famous civil rights advocate had passed away.  They were shocked because they thought
the man had died thirty years ago!

According to an impressively large number of people, Nelson Mandela originally died back in the 80s when he was in prison.  They remember seeing it on the news and hearing about riots that broke out all across South Africa.  It's a very specific memory, and a lot of people share it.  It didn't happen (apparently, anyway), but thousands and thousands of people insist on remembering Mandela's death in prison and the resultant riots, and their accounts are fairly uniform (as uniform as memories ever are, anyway).

Now, people misremember things all the time.  And usually, people can be pretty stubborn about what they remember, especially when it's two memories against each other.  But when presented with something like every single newspaper ever printed that contradicts their claims, most people relent and admit that they're wrong.  With Nelson Mandela's death, the people who swear he died earlier believe this memory so strongly that they will not let go of it, despite being contradicted by every relevant fact in existence.  It isn't because they're just that stubborn, or that stupid.  The memory has a certain quality to it.  For whatever reason, their brain refuses to discard it.

This sort of phenomenon has become known (for better or worse) as the Mandela Effect.  It is when a large number of people share and insist on a fairly cohesive counterfactual memory.

Saturday, July 18, 2015

The fallacy of 'billions of billions', or: Why popular arguments that aliens must exist are bogus.

The universe is an awfully big place.  Granted, most of it is empty space.  But within that empty space, there are trillions of stars.  Maybe more.  At least some of those stars have planets around them, and some of those planets are the kind that could give rise to life.  That's still hundreds of billions (at least) of planets that can support life out there.  And so, the popular argument goes, even if the odds of life arising on another planet are very small, there are so many planets that it is bound to happen.  Thus, there almost certainly exist extraterrestrial life forms.  It isn't a matter of if, but of when we find them.

Here's a video of Dr. Carl Sagan presenting a more sophisticated version of this (with actual numbers) to estimate the number of inhabited planets in our galaxy.  Or try this worksheet on the Drake Equation on the BBC website.

It's a common argument.  And it sounds pretty convincing.  If you keep trying over and over, even though something is unlikely, eventually you will succeed.

It's common and convincing, but it's also fallacious.  Here's the problem: How many times do we have to try before we're guaranteed to succeed?

The mathematical answer is infinitely many times.

Saturday, March 21, 2015

Faeries in Phase Space

A few weeks ago, Professor Ben Zuckerman spoke at my school. He is one of the editors of the popular book "Extraterrestrials: Where Are They?" which explores in part the Fermi paradox: Why haven't extra-terrestrials tried to contact us yet? While he gave two lectures, I only attended one, where he went over many of the ideas in his book, explaining the rarity of technological life and the improbability of us ever making "contact".

I went to the colloquium talk rather interested. In honesty, I kind of misunderstood the intention of the talk (I thought he was going to be arguing against the existence of extraterrestrial life), but I was not disappointed. There were a lot of interesting ideas brought up about how to make contact or about what sorts of development projects we should pursue. And while I think some of them were really bad, they were thought-provoking. (Dr. Zuckerman of course recognizes the flaws of these, saying they are just stage 1 prototype designs).

The talk was very well done and I won't touch on it too much. What I really wanted to address was an audience question asked by one of the professors at my university. First let me provide some background.

Friday, November 7, 2014

How To Read the Voynich Manuscript

In case you aren't familiar with it the Voynich Manuscript (pictured at left) is currently one of the bigger linguistic mysteries out there .  It is a set of some 240 hand-illuminated pages, bound in codex form, making what appears to be a reference work on such topics as herbalism, biology, and astronomy.  Many of the illustrations are of plants and flowers that do not actually exist or cannot be precisely identified.  Most puzzling is the text, which is written in an unknown and undecipherable script that bears no relation to any known language or script.  You can see high-quality scans of the book here, courtesy of the Yale Library.

It is believed that the manuscript is a pharmacopoiea, as it bears some similarities to other such works.  However, much of it is puzzling, and incomprehensible.  Some scholars have proposed the manuscript to be a fake, one of a number of herbals made in the Middle Ages by alchemists and charlatans to impress simple people with the possessor's supposed knowledge.  The text is gibberish, mere squiggles on a page, meant to look like writing and yet containing no message.  That's one proposal.

Yet, the script looks intentional.  The same letters are repeated, and even specific ligatures are discernible.  The letters are repeated in such a way that shows consistency, as though the author were writing in an actual script, and not merely scribbling.

There are all kinds of hypothesis about how and why the manuscript was authored.  The most plausible is probably that the text is an invented script meant to write an East Asian tonal language.  Other theories are that it is a secret script or language invented by the author to hide his writing, or that the script is a code, containing information in some secondary feature of the words.

Those are the best theories.

But I want to propose a crazy theory, and a way to test it.

Monday, September 1, 2014

And Ye Shall Likewise


In days past and in lands forgotten - certainly far before either you or I were born - there in that far-away land stood a great kingdom.  And that kingdom was ruled, of course, by the King, a man of great honor and of great love for his people.  This King was a wise monarch, who dealt with his subjects fairly; and so there was peace in the land, prosperity in the markets, and the people there felt safe to leave their doors unlocked at night.

While the castle slept, the King would disguise himself as a pauper and sneak through passages unknown to his guards to the town beyond the castle walls.  He would take with him a wallet of gold coins out of his treasury, and so equipped he would wander the streets of his capital looking for those in need so that, in secret, he might give them comfort.  Orphans, widows, beggars; he would visit each in turn, under cover of night, and when he left they would discover the King's gift.

And it happened one night, as the King was about this business, that his attendants in court learned of their King's absence.  They learned that the King had left the castle, and left it empty, and that now it was theirs.  They learned that the King was outside of its walls and unable to stop them, unable to enforce his reign.  They learned that they could do whatever they wanted.

Now they could be kings and queens.

Monday, June 30, 2014

The Extent to Which I Could Change My Mind


It pays sometimes to ask yourself the question, what would change my mind?  To what extent could my mind be changed?  What alternatives would I consider?

Asking this kind of question is an important part of basic mental hygiene.  After all, if you never consider the possibility of being wrong, then for all you know you are wrong.  If you never consider the possibility of truth in other systems, then for all you know they are true.

This is a personal post, where I'm going to talk about my religious beliefs.  That's not what I normally do on this blog, but it's my blog and I'll do what I want.  I should mention, this post was inspired in part by a good friend of mine, Nathaniel Givens, in his post here on Times and Seasons.

Monday, June 23, 2014

On the Berenstein Bears Switcheroo


Two years ago, I wrote a post about one of the icons of my childhood, the Berenstein Bears.  Except, as I learned, they aren't called the Berenstein Bears.  As it turns out, they're the Berenstain Bears.

BerenstAin.  With an "A".

My mind was blown.  I had very distinct memories of the bears.  I grew up reading their books and watching them on TV in school, and remember how it used to be spelled.  I tried to figure out when the name had changed.