In a sense I agree with you - most software (and not only operating systems) were initially (and most still are) designed to be easy to crack. Most software that we call now "industry standards" have started this way.
Piracy became *necessary* because the market *requires* from users adequate knowledge of the industry standards even before applying for a job: you will never get a job in any DTP company if you already are not an expert in Photoshop - they will not give you a copy and allow you three months to learn it (as was the case 15 years ago). The same principle applies to any computer-related business: graphic design, multimedia production, architecture or engineering. Ask any professional how he learned the software tools of the trade and he'll tell you that he learned them at home using pirated copies.
This might explain why currently most Computer Science university departments tend to degenerate into software user training centres. This trend is inevitable, because on the one hand graduates must find a job and on the market side the requirement for a university degrees has become part of the workforce selection mechanism.
Therefore, piracy is inevitable as it is an essential prerequisite for both the evolution of the species (the marketplace) in the computer-related capitalist ecosystem and the survival of the fittest among the workforce. This is the essence of "knowledge society" and we must all be forever indebted to Microsoft for making Windows so easy to crack, because otherwise 90% of us/. readers would have a different job today...
Let's clarify one thing: the so-called "cracked software" is seldom distributed as already cracked - there are the installation files and a crack. The installation files are 99.9% of the cases clean (they are the company's originals) while the crack itself is sometimes infected by a malicious uploader and distributed in public p2p sites. In the original "scene" releases the cracks are clean, because they are tested beforehand by the distribution mechanism.
If the "crack" in fact is a serial, there are minimal chances of getting infected.
Therefore one does not get infected by "using cracked software" but by attempting to crack it.
600+ comments on/. and I don't see any deep analysis. Hundreds of philosophical/political/religious/etc books have been written on signs and symbols (even the Dan Brown novels in essence are about symbols) and since I don't have the time to read them all, I am not convinced on some issues. I'd certainly like a linguist or a semantics expert to jump in the discussion, play the game and clarify the following issues:
1. Do symbols have power? Can they affect human behaviour? Can they poison children's/teenagers' souls? Should parents, ministries or Governments be worried on the circulation and use of symbols?
2. What precisely is the power of symbols due to? Why do state and interpersonal laws give them such importance?
3. Is the depiction of the swastika in the game pro or against fascism?
4. Is the killing of Nazis in a computer game (or a movie) a true punishment or an attempt to victimize them? Especially if the game is not accompanied by a declaration of the authors stating that "all actions against Nazis depicted in this game are meant to educate the player against fascism and violence and pro democracy and peace"?
5. When bad Nazis (or serial murders or any criminals) appear in a Hollywood movie played by celebrities, what is the probability of an audience member considering them as heroes or models for their own lives? One in a thousand? One in a million?
6. Would you make love to a girl/boy having a swastika tattoo?
I know I may be considered just a troll, but IMHO nothing is as simple or innocent as it seems. And if I had kids, I'd certainly monitor what games they play on their PCs.
I'm afraid home-schooling has more disadvantages than advantages. Most important of all is that your kids will not learn to defend himself in the society jungle.
Make sure they learn a variety of self-defence techniques and first-aid principles to treat their future knife or shotgun wounds.
I'm not sure a kid has the mental capability of discriminating between sharing candy and sharing music.
I'm afraid that the lesson the kids would perceive is "don't ever share anything, you never know whether it's OK or not and from what I heard today most probably it'll get me in serious trouble".
There is no research indicating that elevating the status of sharing music to a 'crime' will not negatively affect the kids' willingness to share with their brothers, help people in need or have empathy for the suffering.
Such indoctrination will certainly help destroy what's left from our humanism: In the future, when you get hit by a car, expect no one to help you. When in need, expect nobody to lend you ten bucks. And when you get ill, prepare to die alone. Because all sharing is bad.
I'm a TA at a University and I think all teachers and trainers worldwide would drool at the possibility of entering their class just to tell them: "Hi, I have prepared a presentation of today's lesson, anyone interested ask me for it by email, now go play soccer!".
If security is really critical to your situation you have to a) evaluate whether they grasped the concepts b) establish a punishment mechanism for the 'bad' employees c) establish a rewarding mechanism for the 'good' employees. I know this looks like fascism or military training, but if your company wants to survive, it will have to take such drastic measures.
If your company just wants to scare them, even a a 'three strike' policy is not enough - Facebook is more potent than heroine.
Humanity has always spent decades teaching citizens what is good and what is evil, but still a significant percentage of them will commit a felony or a even crime if the motive is good enough.
IMHO 'Alien' without Giger's vision would be just another scary teen movie with at most one lousy sequel.
I don't know if Hollywood (or even the whole history of Cinema) has ever seen a better Concept Designer. Look up Giger's works, they extend beyond the Big Bang. Look at the space and spaces, the female deities of death, their copulations with the unnamed and unspeakable. The colourless colours. The silence of aeons. The waves of emptiness. The void in the vastness. Just looking at his works and attempting to describe them will make a poet out of you. A dark poet that is, in the vein of Poe and Lovecraft and Bradbury.
We were very lucky that Alien was done in 1979. Today it would be totally illegal to produce such a movie: it addresses peoples' and societies' dark side, the unconscious buried both in each living cell and in the collective (un)consciousness, this making it equivalent to terrorism.
The Alien prequel will have to be "legal", "politically correct" and "viable". So don't be surprised if you see a love story plot in it: the producers always reserve the right to make it appealing to your significant other (reminds you of anything?).
... (by Sun Tzu) is probably the only holy (non-red) book that Jobbs was/is reading everyday before sleep. Secrecy is a fine weapon. Energy efficient and non-violent too.
I will reluctantly counterpoint ancient wisdom with a quote from the former Greek lunatic dictator George Papadopoulos (1967-1974): "Please allow me to worship surprise attacks, and therefore prepare to get surprised".
Don't get fooled by this 'surprise theater', if I may coin the term. Is it really different from the complementary strategy? "Look! We have nothing to hide, we are together in this, there are no secrets, no hidden agendas, let's live together in harmony" (insert romantic Hollywood scenery sequence featuring a transparent beer summit).
Let me digress a bit: I am not fooled by the staged wars between MS and Apple. These two may well amount to the 90% of all tech customers (and developers), in the same sense that Republicans and Democrats represent the 90% of politically active Americans. However, I firmly believe that totalitarianism (100%) is not very different from 50%+40% or even 70%+20%. Some will say that "divide and conquer" is one of the main lessons we get from History, including civil wars. It's a blatant lie, "divide" does not necessarily mean "divide in two".
Let's not forget that it's the third way, the mutated gene, the remaining 10% that makes the difference and provides new perspectives and hopes for a better future. Anyone ignoring the big picture and arguing pro or against Apple's secrecy without taking into account not only Microsoft but also that tiny 10% (many of us would call it Linux, open source and collaborative production paradigms) is no better than those orchestrating the endless (but never purposeless) mainstream media-induced sagas.
Making technological and other life choices involving money in the 21st century means signing contracts with the Devil. So, make sure to read the fine print. Choose your Devil. Sell your soul for a good price. And make sure all rest suffer in Hell worse than you.
"a lot less reboots when installing software/drivers/updates" is the first and best argument that might persuade me to migrate - do you have any references this is the case with Win7 ?
when the devices are not to blame at all? It's the users who are the weak link, since they are not actively and proactively educated to protect themselves.
This security theater has been staged centuries ago. I believe that all devices are expressly designed to be crackable or with backdoors for various reasons. True security is worth true money (think of banks) and true privacy is reserved for government use.
If our society (and governments) were really interested in protecting our privacy and our assets, there would exist several laws enforcing manufacturers to state explicitly in their products' User Manuals, and using big bold letters, disclaimers like this:
"WARNING! This device does NOT provide security in case it comes to the wrong hands. Therefore, do NOT use it for storing passwords, bank account details or any sensitive information. Our Company cannot be and will not be held liable for the loss of your Identity, Material or Intellectual Property or for other damages etc etc"...
I don't care whether the Device Under Test does not claim to offer any security in its specifications. What I'm raged about is that it does not state explicitly, in a language comprehensible even by a child, that "the device does NOT offer security, don't use it as a safe, don't trust it, period".
In this sense (unless such a disclaimer actually exists in the iPhone's user manual), I accuse Apple (and any portable device manufacturer at that) of actively and purposefully misguiding customers into a sense of false security hidden behind the bling (damn, it costs $650, has all these PINs and passwords and fingerprint/face recognition, it must be totally secure!).
... they postulate that we must account for the assumptions used in a probability estimate
If you read more Bayesian stuff, you will see that this is not some author's arbitrary postulate, it's the standard, simple, sensible and straightforward Bayesian way to include previous knowledge in a probability model. In fact it's the only way.
...there are no absolute probabilities - only probabilities under some assumptions
De Finetti's seminal book starts with "Probability does not exist" - meaning that probability is not an intrinsic feature of reality, but a human concept that cannot "exist" i.e. live outside the human mind.
I am sure that the referees to the journal they'll attempt to publish this in are more experts than we are and they'll notice the inconsistencies in language (they truly try to balance on two boats). So the authors sooner or later will have to clarify their approach. This paper is prime stuff for e.g. Foundations of Science. I really hope that the popularity the article gets through/. will force the authors to read our comments and edit their manuscript. The people want to know more!
Re:Or that history repeats itself
on
Less Is Moore
·
· Score: 1
Continuing your line of arguments, and taking into account the convergence of technologies, we could extrapolate that in say 10 years all that will be left gadgetwise would be one or two brands of an smartphone-like device that serves as a netbook, a phone, an mp3 player, a gps, a camera and a projector (the latter as a substitute of a big monitor).
Currently, smartphones are about twice the price of a netbook, and their prices tend to be stable, because they keep adding new functionalities and more RAM. Gradually the prices will start falling and they will start getting a share from netbooks.
All commodities under competition follow an S-curve (Theodore Modis, "Predictions"
I think that the probability of the earth being destroyed is 1. When this will happen (before or after LHC) does not matter much.
However, LHC might show the way to new energy sources (fission) and thus save mankind for some more thousands of years.
As my grandmother said, "there's no evil without a good implication". And TFA, being either accurate or inaccurate, will certainly motivate some youngster to delve into the mysteries of Science. And that is a Good Thing (TM).
Unfortunately, I think that the authors' language is a mixture of frequentist and bayesian terminology, because they either don't want to take sides, or they attempt to convince readers that their line of thought applies to all paradigms (or both).
"assuming 50/50" would denote total ignorance, which would be a lie.
The "expert's opinion" you mention would most likely be a frequentist's published estimate. The estimate of a "lay person" is much more close to the bayesian point of view, and therefore in the context of unique events (like LHC) much more sensible.
All "numbers we end up with" are junk, unless the specific model, theory and calculations are made explicit.
And yes, there are very dangerous uses of probability theory. Think of war games, economic crashes, fatal mistakes at hospitals. Unless we all get a real grip of the concepts, we are at the mercy of "experts" and "academics".
Have a look at "What is probability?" in d'Agostini's "Bayesian Primer" (http://www.roma1.infn.it/~dagos/cern/node35.html). I am sure you will like his scepticism, and if you are physics or mathematics inclined, you'll read the rest and see the light like I did 10 years ago.
I am very glad you posted, because I was about to send you my comments by email.
First, I was fascinated by your paper! As a physicist, my limited understanding of probability cames from two decades' struggle and research to decide on what to teach in the first-year Physics Intoductory Laboratory regarding measurement and experimental data treatment.
I believe that your article is a must-read for _any_ first-year university student, be it in natural sciences, medicine, law, engineering or even economics (regarding economics, I am certain you have already read Nassim Nicholas Taleb 's "Black Swan", which deals with the same issues in a different language). Your paper might trigger some ideas on simpler examples teach in order to illustrate the fallacies due to misapplication of formalism and dogmatism.
Please allow me to ask the following clarifications:
1. In your paper you seem to avoid clarifying the concept of "probability". Is this done on purpose? As I see it, most calculations of probability, uncertainty and risk are plagued from both ambiguous use of the concepts themselves and an even more ambiguous and arbitrary use of previous literature's "probability" results. In other words, making a meta-use of your terminology, I think that both a given author's and the literature's i) theory of probability used; ii) specific models applied to the problem; and c) calculations of probability made should be a) explicit and b) compatible.
2. Especially in the case of rare and even unique events, I think one cannot avoid discussing and clarifying the real meaning of probability in those contexts. For example, what is the meaning of the probability of collapse of the Golden Gate Bridge, or the probability of a 10 km asteroid hitting the Earth? I think that in order to calculate such probabilities within the frequentist paradigm, one has to have a sample space of at least 30 such events to produce a somewhat (~10% ???) reliable estimate. So what is the meaning of P(X) according to your standpoint?
3. To be more specific, if X = the catastrophe occurs, can P(X) have any meaning within the frequentist paradigm, when such a catastrophe has never ever happened? (Especially when you do not clarify whether P(X) denotes the "objective" probability of the event or the "subjective" probability of the statement "the catastrophe occurs").
4. Since it appeared to me that you have taken special care to avoid triggering any paradigm wars in your article, should we conclude you have devised or are following some particular unifying approach?
Finally, I think that it would be most instructive if you could provide a historical (or LHC-related) example of risk assessments for the same event according to different paradigms (frequentist, bayesian, mixed, other) and discuss their strengths and weaknesses. This discussion could serve as an enlightning example of the epistemological implications of Figure 2.
I could summarise TFA as follows: we don't need science, we don't need models, we don't need scientists, all we need is competent statisticians and analysts.
My first reservation is the oversimplification of science as presented in TFA. It is a very bold claim to assume there is a universal "scientific method". Hard sciences (e.g. physics) and soft sciences (e.g. sociology) have totally different research strategies and criteria of model success. Similarly, I don't think there are universal roles of models and mental models in sciences. Finally, a model may be able to predict the past, i.e. fit into existing data, but this does not guarantee that the same model can reliably predict the future.
The second reservation (and I am glad this was implied by the comment above on LHC data) is that both data collection and data treatment are inevitably theory-laden. On the one hand, we need a theory to provide criteria of what counts as data. In the LHC experiment, an valid event may be masked by millions of noise data points. Both a very solid theory of the phenomena and a theory of the instruments are needed to declare an event as valid.
On the other hand, data treatment (number crunching) also implies taking many assumptions on the distribution of the data, and on the probabilistic and statistical paradigms used to approach them. To provide an example, how do you interpret a statement like "the probability of Brooklyn Bridge to collapse in the next month is one in a million"? The person claiming this has studied a million bridges like the Brooklyn one and found that on average one of them collapses every month?
In that sense, I'm afraid that the scientific method, unless premises and prior knowledge are explicitly and adequately taken into account, cannot help hunting its tail. Theory will always be underdetermined by data.
In addition, as some commenters have indicated, some data coming from complex processes are well known to resist analysis. Global warming is an excellent example, where different starting points predict totally different outcomes.
The techniques implied by TFA may provide good likelihood estimates, that is probabilities of data obtained by a specific model, in the same sense that we can check the correct spelling of a word by the number of its google references. However, when the data are scarce, googling cannot help. I would trust more an artist to provide answers to interesting questions like the meaning of the universe ("42") than the billions of monkeys like me typing the google search space.
I think a more appropriate title for the article would be "The end of data". In the ocean of data, the relevant bits are lost and their identity gets diluted in the vastness.
The end of humanity must be just the same thing - loss of identity, heat death, maximum entropy: all is the same, all is equal, all is meaningless.
I don't know why this has happened, but I got a very nasty BSOD from my video card (igxpdv64.sys, onboard Intel G965 Express on an Asus mb) when loading the applet (Firefox 2, Win XP x64).
I felt compelled to report this because this phenomenon (BSOD caused by a web browser, of from java in general) has never happened to me in my 20 years of computing.
Slashdot Mirror
In a sense I agree with you - most software (and not only operating systems) were initially (and most still are) designed to be easy to crack. Most software that we call now "industry standards" have started this way.
Piracy became *necessary* because the market *requires* from users adequate knowledge of the industry standards even before applying for a job: you will never get a job in any DTP company if you already are not an expert in Photoshop - they will not give you a copy and allow you three months to learn it (as was the case 15 years ago). The same principle applies to any computer-related business: graphic design, multimedia production, architecture or engineering. Ask any professional how he learned the software tools of the trade and he'll tell you that he learned them at home using pirated copies.
This might explain why currently most Computer Science university departments tend to degenerate into software user training centres. This trend is inevitable, because on the one hand graduates must find a job and on the market side the requirement for a university degrees has become part of the workforce selection mechanism.
Therefore, piracy is inevitable as it is an essential prerequisite for both the evolution of the species (the marketplace) in the computer-related capitalist ecosystem and the survival of the fittest among the workforce. This is the essence of "knowledge society" and we must all be forever indebted to Microsoft for making Windows so easy to crack, because otherwise 90% of us /. readers would have a different job today...
Let's clarify one thing: the so-called "cracked software" is seldom distributed as already cracked - there are the installation files and a crack. The installation files are 99.9% of the cases clean (they are the company's originals) while the crack itself is sometimes infected by a malicious uploader and distributed in public p2p sites. In the original "scene" releases the cracks are clean, because they are tested beforehand by the distribution mechanism.
If the "crack" in fact is a serial, there are minimal chances of getting infected.
Therefore one does not get infected by "using cracked software" but by attempting to crack it.
600+ comments on /. and I don't see any deep analysis. Hundreds of philosophical/political/religious/etc books have been written on signs and symbols (even the Dan Brown novels in essence are about symbols) and since I don't have the time to read them all, I am not convinced on some issues. I'd certainly like a linguist or a semantics expert to jump in the discussion, play the game and clarify the following issues:
1. Do symbols have power? Can they affect human behaviour? Can they poison children's/teenagers' souls? Should parents, ministries or Governments be worried on the circulation and use of symbols?
2. What precisely is the power of symbols due to? Why do state and interpersonal laws give them such importance?
3. Is the depiction of the swastika in the game pro or against fascism?
4. Is the killing of Nazis in a computer game (or a movie) a true punishment or an attempt to victimize them? Especially if the game is not accompanied by a declaration of the authors stating that "all actions against Nazis depicted in this game are meant to educate the player against fascism and violence and pro democracy and peace"?
5. When bad Nazis (or serial murders or any criminals) appear in a Hollywood movie played by celebrities, what is the probability of an audience member considering them as heroes or models for their own lives? One in a thousand? One in a million?
6. Would you make love to a girl/boy having a swastika tattoo?
I know I may be considered just a troll, but IMHO nothing is as simple or innocent as it seems. And if I had kids, I'd certainly monitor what games they play on their PCs.
If 2 and 2 are measurement results, then 4.0000000000 is definitely incorrect, it should have the proper number of significant figures.
I'm afraid home-schooling has more disadvantages than advantages. Most important of all is that your kids will not learn to defend himself in the society jungle.
Make sure they learn a variety of self-defence techniques and first-aid principles to treat their future knife or shotgun wounds.
I'm not sure a kid has the mental capability of discriminating between sharing candy and sharing music.
I'm afraid that the lesson the kids would perceive is "don't ever share anything, you never know whether it's OK or not and from what I heard today most probably it'll get me in serious trouble".
There is no research indicating that elevating the status of sharing music to a 'crime' will not negatively affect the kids' willingness to share with their brothers, help people in need or have empathy for the suffering.
Such indoctrination will certainly help destroy what's left from our humanism: In the future, when you get hit by a car, expect no one to help you. When in need, expect nobody to lend you ten bucks. And when you get ill, prepare to die alone. Because all sharing is bad.
I'm afraid you are describing an ideal world.
I'm a TA at a University and I think all teachers and trainers worldwide would drool at the possibility of entering their class just to tell them: "Hi, I have prepared a presentation of today's lesson, anyone interested ask me for it by email, now go play soccer!".
If security is really critical to your situation you have to a) evaluate whether they grasped the concepts b) establish a punishment mechanism for the 'bad' employees c) establish a rewarding mechanism for the 'good' employees. I know this looks like fascism or military training, but if your company wants to survive, it will have to take such drastic measures.
If your company just wants to scare them, even a a 'three strike' policy is not enough - Facebook is more potent than heroine.
Humanity has always spent decades teaching citizens what is good and what is evil, but still a significant percentage of them will commit a felony or a even crime if the motive is good enough.
It's a Turing test and you failed, you are definitely a human.
IMHO 'Alien' without Giger's vision would be just another scary teen movie with at most one lousy sequel.
I don't know if Hollywood (or even the whole history of Cinema) has ever seen a better Concept Designer. Look up Giger's works, they extend beyond the Big Bang. Look at the space and spaces, the female deities of death, their copulations with the unnamed and unspeakable. The colourless colours. The silence of aeons. The waves of emptiness. The void in the vastness. Just looking at his works and attempting to describe them will make a poet out of you. A dark poet that is, in the vein of Poe and Lovecraft and Bradbury.
We were very lucky that Alien was done in 1979. Today it would be totally illegal to produce such a movie: it addresses peoples' and societies' dark side, the unconscious buried both in each living cell and in the collective (un)consciousness, this making it equivalent to terrorism.
The Alien prequel will have to be "legal", "politically correct" and "viable". So don't be surprised if you see a love story plot in it: the producers always reserve the right to make it appealing to your significant other (reminds you of anything?).
... (by Sun Tzu) is probably the only holy (non-red) book that Jobbs was/is reading everyday before sleep. Secrecy is a fine weapon. Energy efficient and non-violent too.
I will reluctantly counterpoint ancient wisdom with a quote from the former Greek lunatic dictator George Papadopoulos (1967-1974): "Please allow me to worship surprise attacks, and therefore prepare to get surprised".
Don't get fooled by this 'surprise theater', if I may coin the term. Is it really different from the complementary strategy? "Look! We have nothing to hide, we are together in this, there are no secrets, no hidden agendas, let's live together in harmony" (insert romantic Hollywood scenery sequence featuring a transparent beer summit).
Let me digress a bit: I am not fooled by the staged wars between MS and Apple. These two may well amount to the 90% of all tech customers (and developers), in the same sense that Republicans and Democrats represent the 90% of politically active Americans. However, I firmly believe that totalitarianism (100%) is not very different from 50%+40% or even 70%+20%. Some will say that "divide and conquer" is one of the main lessons we get from History, including civil wars. It's a blatant lie, "divide" does not necessarily mean "divide in two".
Let's not forget that it's the third way, the mutated gene, the remaining 10% that makes the difference and provides new perspectives and hopes for a better future. Anyone ignoring the big picture and arguing pro or against Apple's secrecy without taking into account not only Microsoft but also that tiny 10% (many of us would call it Linux, open source and collaborative production paradigms) is no better than those orchestrating the endless (but never purposeless) mainstream media-induced sagas.
Making technological and other life choices involving money in the 21st century means signing contracts with the Devil. So, make sure to read the fine print. Choose your Devil. Sell your soul for a good price. And make sure all rest suffer in Hell worse than you.
Lenovo IdeaPad S12 - 295956U - Black is $429 on shop.lenovo.com
(while the 295955U and 295954U are Atom-based and +$70).
"a lot less reboots when installing software/drivers/updates" is the first and best argument that might persuade me to migrate - do you have any references this is the case with Win7 ?
when the devices are not to blame at all? It's the users who are the weak link, since they are not actively and proactively educated to protect themselves.
This security theater has been staged centuries ago. I believe that all devices are expressly designed to be crackable or with backdoors for various reasons. True security is worth true money (think of banks) and true privacy is reserved for government use.
If our society (and governments) were really interested in protecting our privacy and our assets, there would exist several laws enforcing manufacturers to state explicitly in their products' User Manuals, and using big bold letters, disclaimers like this:
"WARNING! This device does NOT provide security in case it comes to the wrong hands. Therefore, do NOT use it for storing passwords, bank account details or any sensitive information. Our Company cannot be and will not be held liable for the loss of your Identity, Material or Intellectual Property or for other damages etc etc"...
I don't care whether the Device Under Test does not claim to offer any security in its specifications. What I'm raged about is that it does not state explicitly, in a language comprehensible even by a child, that "the device does NOT offer security, don't use it as a safe, don't trust it, period".
In this sense (unless such a disclaimer actually exists in the iPhone's user manual), I accuse Apple (and any portable device manufacturer at that) of actively and purposefully misguiding customers into a sense of false security hidden behind the bling (damn, it costs $650, has all these PINs and passwords and fingerprint/face recognition, it must be totally secure!).
... they postulate that we must account for the assumptions used in a probability estimate
If you read more Bayesian stuff, you will see that this is not some author's arbitrary postulate, it's the standard, simple, sensible and straightforward Bayesian way to include previous knowledge in a probability model. In fact it's the only way.
...there are no absolute probabilities - only probabilities under some assumptions
De Finetti's seminal book starts with "Probability does not exist" - meaning that probability is not an intrinsic feature of reality, but a human concept that cannot "exist" i.e. live outside the human mind.
I am sure that the referees to the journal they'll attempt to publish this in are more experts than we are and they'll notice the inconsistencies in language (they truly try to balance on two boats). So the authors sooner or later will have to clarify their approach. This paper is prime stuff for e.g. Foundations of Science. I really hope that the popularity the article gets through /. will force the authors to read our comments and edit their manuscript. The people want to know more!
Continuing your line of arguments, and taking into account the convergence of technologies, we could extrapolate that in say 10 years all that will be left gadgetwise would be one or two brands of an smartphone-like device that serves as a netbook, a phone, an mp3 player, a gps, a camera and a projector (the latter as a substitute of a big monitor).
Currently, smartphones are about twice the price of a netbook, and their prices tend to be stable, because they keep adding new functionalities and more RAM. Gradually the prices will start falling and they will start getting a share from netbooks.
All commodities under competition follow an S-curve (Theodore Modis, "Predictions"
I think that the probability of the earth being destroyed is 1. When this will happen (before or after LHC) does not matter much.
However, LHC might show the way to new energy sources (fission) and thus save mankind for some more thousands of years.
As my grandmother said, "there's no evil without a good implication". And TFA, being either accurate or inaccurate, will certainly motivate some youngster to delve into the mysteries of Science. And that is a Good Thing (TM).
Unfortunately, I think that the authors' language is a mixture of frequentist and bayesian terminology, because they either don't want to take sides, or they attempt to convince readers that their line of thought applies to all paradigms (or both).
"assuming 50/50" would denote total ignorance, which would be a lie.
The "expert's opinion" you mention would most likely be a frequentist's published estimate. The estimate of a "lay person" is much more close to the bayesian point of view, and therefore in the context of unique events (like LHC) much more sensible.
All "numbers we end up with" are junk, unless the specific model, theory and calculations are made explicit.
And yes, there are very dangerous uses of probability theory. Think of war games, economic crashes, fatal mistakes at hospitals. Unless we all get a real grip of the concepts, we are at the mercy of "experts" and "academics".
Have a look at "What is probability?" in d'Agostini's "Bayesian Primer" (http://www.roma1.infn.it/~dagos/cern/node35.html). I am sure you will like his scepticism, and if you are physics or mathematics inclined, you'll read the rest and see the light like I did 10 years ago.
I am very glad you posted, because I was about to send you my comments by email.
First, I was fascinated by your paper! As a physicist, my limited understanding of probability cames from two decades' struggle and research to decide on what to teach in the first-year Physics Intoductory Laboratory regarding measurement and experimental data treatment.
I believe that your article is a must-read for _any_ first-year university student, be it in natural sciences, medicine, law, engineering or even economics (regarding economics, I am certain you have already read Nassim Nicholas Taleb 's "Black Swan", which deals with the same issues in a different language). Your paper might trigger some ideas on simpler examples teach in order to illustrate the fallacies due to misapplication of formalism and dogmatism.
Please allow me to ask the following clarifications:
1. In your paper you seem to avoid clarifying the concept of "probability". Is this done on purpose? As I see it, most calculations of probability, uncertainty and risk are plagued from both ambiguous use of the concepts themselves and an even more ambiguous and arbitrary use of previous literature's "probability" results. In other words, making a meta-use of your terminology, I think that both a given author's and the literature's i) theory of probability used; ii) specific models applied to the problem; and c) calculations of probability made should be a) explicit and b) compatible.
2. Especially in the case of rare and even unique events, I think one cannot avoid discussing and clarifying the real meaning of probability in those contexts. For example, what is the meaning of the probability of collapse of the Golden Gate Bridge, or the probability of a 10 km asteroid hitting the Earth? I think that in order to calculate such probabilities within the frequentist paradigm, one has to have a sample space of at least 30 such events to produce a somewhat (~10% ???) reliable estimate. So what is the meaning of P(X) according to your standpoint?
3. To be more specific, if X = the catastrophe occurs, can P(X) have any meaning within the frequentist paradigm, when such a catastrophe has never ever happened? (Especially when you do not clarify whether P(X) denotes the "objective" probability of the event or the "subjective" probability of the statement "the catastrophe occurs").
4. Since it appeared to me that you have taken special care to avoid triggering any paradigm wars in your article, should we conclude you have devised or are following some particular unifying approach?
Finally, I think that it would be most instructive if you could provide a historical (or LHC-related) example of risk assessments for the same event according to different paradigms (frequentist, bayesian, mixed, other) and discuss their strengths and weaknesses. This discussion could serve as an enlightning example of the epistemological implications of Figure 2.
Thanks in advance!
I could summarise TFA as follows: we don't need science, we don't need models, we don't need scientists, all we need is competent statisticians and analysts. My first reservation is the oversimplification of science as presented in TFA. It is a very bold claim to assume there is a universal "scientific method". Hard sciences (e.g. physics) and soft sciences (e.g. sociology) have totally different research strategies and criteria of model success. Similarly, I don't think there are universal roles of models and mental models in sciences. Finally, a model may be able to predict the past, i.e. fit into existing data, but this does not guarantee that the same model can reliably predict the future. The second reservation (and I am glad this was implied by the comment above on LHC data) is that both data collection and data treatment are inevitably theory-laden. On the one hand, we need a theory to provide criteria of what counts as data. In the LHC experiment, an valid event may be masked by millions of noise data points. Both a very solid theory of the phenomena and a theory of the instruments are needed to declare an event as valid. On the other hand, data treatment (number crunching) also implies taking many assumptions on the distribution of the data, and on the probabilistic and statistical paradigms used to approach them. To provide an example, how do you interpret a statement like "the probability of Brooklyn Bridge to collapse in the next month is one in a million"? The person claiming this has studied a million bridges like the Brooklyn one and found that on average one of them collapses every month? In that sense, I'm afraid that the scientific method, unless premises and prior knowledge are explicitly and adequately taken into account, cannot help hunting its tail. Theory will always be underdetermined by data. In addition, as some commenters have indicated, some data coming from complex processes are well known to resist analysis. Global warming is an excellent example, where different starting points predict totally different outcomes. The techniques implied by TFA may provide good likelihood estimates, that is probabilities of data obtained by a specific model, in the same sense that we can check the correct spelling of a word by the number of its google references. However, when the data are scarce, googling cannot help. I would trust more an artist to provide answers to interesting questions like the meaning of the universe ("42") than the billions of monkeys like me typing the google search space. I think a more appropriate title for the article would be "The end of data". In the ocean of data, the relevant bits are lost and their identity gets diluted in the vastness. The end of humanity must be just the same thing - loss of identity, heat death, maximum entropy: all is the same, all is equal, all is meaningless.
I don't know why this has happened, but I got a very nasty BSOD from my video card (igxpdv64.sys, onboard Intel G965 Express on an Asus mb) when loading the applet (Firefox 2, Win XP x64). I felt compelled to report this because this phenomenon (BSOD caused by a web browser, of from java in general) has never happened to me in my 20 years of computing.