Tag: science

Universal Scaling

And this scrambling process happens very early indeed. In their papers this spring, Berges, Gasenzer and their collaborators independently described prescaling for the first time, a period before universal scaling that their papers predicted for nuclear collisions and ultracold atoms, respectively. Prescaling suggests that when a system first evolves from its initial, far-from-equilibrium condition, scaling exponents don’t yet perfectly describe it. The system retains some of its previous structure — remnants of its initial configuration. But as prescaling progresses, the system assumes a more universal form in space and time, essentially obscuring irrelevant information about its own past. If this idea is borne out by future experiments, prescaling may be the nocking of time’s arrow onto the bowstring.

Base rate fallacy

The flawed reasoning behind the Replication Crisis

Medical students are now routinely taught the diagnostic importance of base incidence rates. Bayes’ theorem helps them properly contextualize test results and avoid unnecessarily alarming patients who test positive for something rare. To leave out that final ingredient, the Bayesian prior probability, would be to commit a fallacy of the same species as the one in the Sally Clark case. The crisis of replication has exposed the fact, which has been the shameful secret of statistics for decades now, that the same fallacy is at the heart of modern scientific practice.

Emotional reasoning

People are often unmoved by dispassionate logic, peer-reviewed research and statistics, but in fact are swayed by ego, emotion, self-interest and identity. If we want our public discourse to succeed in changing attitudes, Gordon-Smith insists, we have to ditch our idealized, sterile picture of persuasion and be more sensitive to how people behave in real life. Gordon-Smith’s silence on what rationality requires of us – might seem like a shortcoming, but in the end it is strategic. She debunks easy answers while shrewdly adopting a position of intellectual humility. She thinks we are ignorant of rationality’s demands, and “very close to the edge of what we know how to talk about at all sensibly”. It is sometimes held that rationality defines us as human, a claim written into our species name, Homo sapiens. If this is right, it follows from Gordon-Smith’s witty, intelligent book that, like the people she profiles, we do not really know who, or even what, we are.

Quantum Darwinism

One of the most remarkable ideas in this theoretical framework is that the definite properties of objects that we associate with classical physics are selected from a menu of quantum possibilities in a process loosely analogous to natural selection in evolution: The properties that survive are in some sense the “fittest.” As in natural selection, the survivors are those that make the most copies of themselves. This means that many independent observers can make measurements of a quantum system and agree on the outcome — a hallmark of classical behavior.

Modeling Evolution

Barricelli programmed some of the earliest computer algorithms that resemble real-life processes: a subdivision of what we now call “artificial life,” which seeks to simulate living systems—evolution, adaptation, ecology—in computers. Barricelli presented a bold challenge to the standard Darwinian model of evolution by competition by demonstrating that organisms evolved by symbiosis and cooperation. Until his death in 1993, Barricelli floated between biological and mathematical sciences, questioning doctrine, not quite fitting in. “He was a brilliant, eccentric genius”

BM 6 Degrees of Separation

Our experiment, incubated in Scalable Cooperation in collaboration with computer and network scientists, was a play on the Small World Experiment. We designed it with the same structure of Milgram’s original 1962 study, routing information through Burning Man’s social network with a series of parcels. These parcels, which we named “Vessels” (because everything at Burning Man can and should have a vaguely ritualistic name), were handed out on the first day of Burning Man 2018, containing information about a particular individual at Burning Man. The clearly stated goal of the vessel was to end up in the possession of this individual, so we refer to them as the Terminus. From hand-off to hand-off, these Vessels would collect a variety of information, stories, and data about their journey. We hoped these journeys would allow us to quantitatively map the connectivity of the Burning Man community and qualitatively understand how people engage with Burning Man culture. We hoped not only to count the number of hops of each successful chain, and compare that measure of social connectivity with Milgram’s 6 degrees of separation, but also to see what cultural, geographic, or attitudinal factors affect success rates. These are not questions that can be probed by scientific methods alone, so we enlisted the input of designers and artists in order to better explore the subjectivity of Burning Man’s magic.