You're reading something into my posts that isn't there. I agree that an 85% success rate would be impressive and convincing. One test, however, is not, which is why the agreed terms include a number of challenges.
Thats not how Randi's FAQ portrays it. The example given is "Spoon bends or not", not "You have 10 tries to bend the spoon"
but the point stands: ten out of ten heads is less likely than any other outcome (except ten tails).
No, you are still showing a lack of grasp on how probability works. The chance of HHHHHHHHHH is exactly the same as HHHHHHHHHT. This should be obvious because the chance of the 9 heads in both series is the same (identical), so if the 10th flip if 50% one way 50% the other, so the chances of either are still the same.
For the probablities to be different, flips would have to be influenced somehow by previous tosses. Like somehow the coin is thinking 'hmmm, thats a lot of heads in a row, I better toss in a tail to mix it up!". Thats not the way things work.
Are you claiming that someone has met the challenge and Randi has still refused to pay, breaking the agreement?
No, but your description of how to conduct a challenge was bogus that way when you said "now let's see you do it again."
From reading his FAQ, it seems that Randi never really proceeds into the official challenge. Instead he does somekind of preliminary test, or declares a claim dangerious or inherently spurious. Some of the examples given seem spurious to me. If a dowser claims they can detect X underground, why does the preliminary test have to be detecting X under a teacup. That implies the ability works in a particular sort of way, that the dowser has a connection to X. But what if alleged ability really workded and it stemmed from detecting distortions in some sort of field charateristic of the earth. The preliminary test would exclude that possibility, ergo Randi is insisting preliminary tests that test something other than the claim.
Randi flat out refused to test a Bretharian claiming that the withholding of food endangered the testee. Now Bretharians are amusingly silly. I recall in the book High Wierdness by Mail how the founder got caught with food wrappers in his room. But is it really so difficult to do a non dangerious test of it. All sorts of body chemestry goes funny when you fast. Just make sure the guy doesn't secretly eat for a few days, and plot things like his blood glucose level. If the values stay level, then the guy is not starving himself, if they go skewed, then he is. You could tell long before there was any danger. The 'too dangerious to test' ruling by Randi just seems like a cop out.
It all smacks of Randi trying to avoid actual tests, not because he would lose, but because they would be a pain in the ass to administer. That may be human nature, but you can't claim its scientific.
Thanks for letting your hatred of Microsoft blind you to the obvious. WGA, anti-theft tags and surgery are broadly beneficial when the processes surrounding them operate in the intended manner in the vast majority of instances
Wow! You mean you've identified the ACTUAL direct advantage that immediately benefits the legal licencee in direct consequence of his installing WGA vs not installing it? Not an indirect benefit, like 'Whats good for Microsoft is good for the USA' or benefit used as a euphensism, as in 'Say, nice store you got here. Be a shame if something were to happen to it. Consider the benefits of subscribing to our neighborhood watch program'.
dowsers don't just claim "I went in my back yard and found water once". They claim they can do it on command, reliably, which is why they charge for their service.
So if they hypothetically only had a success rate of (pull number from air) 85%, they wouldn't be worth hiring just on the fair odds that their assay would be helpful?
I think you oversimplify how the world works. At some fee that level of accuracy would be worthwhile. The world is not binary.
I don't think a guy who could guess 50 cards right in a shuffled deck is that much less spooky than the guy who could guess a whole 52 card deck? A little maybe, but not much. I sure wouldn't play poker with him!:)
Except [10 coin flips resulting in heads in a row] not as likely as any other sequence, so Alternate Universe Randi would be wrong.
Dude, go back to school. There are 2 to the tenth power possible sequences of 10 coin flips. Think of it as a 10 bit binary number. if the coin is truly 50%/50% then every sequence of 10 tosses has the exact same probablity: 1 out of 1024. That includes the all heads 10 coin sequence.
So the next step would be to say, "OK, that was cool, now let's see you do it again.
Aren't Randi's contracts very yodaish? "Do or Do not, there is no try". Thats what his FAQ says (without using Yoda as a adjective) If the feat Randi contracted for was to be 10 controlled flips, a reasonable person would expect Randi to pay then an there. No 'OK! one more time!'.
Your performance as one of Randi's fans, with statistics bobbles and welching on contracts if your expectations are not met sure doesn't lead me to be changing my mind on Randi's character anytime soon. Basicallly your worldview is unscientific, with 'experiments' biased by the observer, spinning the results.
Being dead, the chance of a dupicate error is rather more remote than a teller screwing up removing a dye spurting anti-shoplift tag. So do you really think you can make the situation analogy really parallel?
Beyond that the valve is really part of the 'product' not an temporary aspect of the process. I never proposed eliminating the product.
Lets see if your analogy can be adjusted. Perhaps the surgeon uses his nifty new laser scapel to do the operation, and its set a tad too high and slices right into the heart. Why yes, indeed I might pick skipping the laser scapel, and sticking with a regular scapel for operation part deux.
"Somehow though, "being constantly suspected of being a thief by Microsoft" is vastly different. Yeah, right.
Come to think of it, if a store body cavity searched me on a daily basis (no matter how gentle), analogous to WGA's daily delve into my whole system followed by a phone home, I DO think I might stop shopping there.
Uhh, no. One stupid/forgetful employee cost you that money and time. Without that technology, you probably would have paid more for the item than the gas+time cost you, because the store would have to make up for losses due to increased shoplifting
You seem to be confusing proximate cause with primary cause or even sole cause.
Lets set up an A/B comparison, and see which factor elimination results in the problem not occuring again.
A) Eliminate the employee. Can situation happen again? YES. Diffiernt employee can make the same mistake.
B) Eliminate that particular tag system. Can situation happen again? NO. The possibility of making that particular mistake is eliminated.
Still looks to me as if that sstem cost me money. It might have saved the store something, but that does not automatically help my pocketbook.
As for price, I wonder where you live, because here they charge what they can maximize profit on. The system might reduce their costs, and that means they can lower their price. The ability to do so, by itself, is no inducement to do so. (It is unlikely in rge incident under discussion that competition would reduce price, as the item was an impulse buy kind of thing, not a commodity.)
If there really was any truth behind dowsing, you wouldn't have to point to a solitary trial.
Perhaps you should work on your english parsing skills.
I use that incident to form an opinion on James Randi, not on dowsing. My opinion on dowsing is still "I've never seen it, show me"
Yes, one incident of Mr Randi acting unscientific in a situation where they were trying to be scientific is enough to form such an opinion. I continue to hold that opinion in absence of him doing something like apologizing after he'd realized he'd commited a statistcal error. Mr Clark failed to mention any such action on Mr Randi's part.
One might argue about the definition of "average" or "normal", but dowsing and ESP are pretty clear-cut: either you can find buried water or you can't.
Thats rather simplistic. Like Tiger Woods can always hit a hole in one? So if he misses one, then you can say he he's incapible? If the interpretor is cooking the stats, he can always spin to keep his claims safe. Like if someone were to claim the could control the flip of a coin, they either could or not, Right? Lets say someone made that claim, and under controlled conditions with a normal coin was able to produce Heads, Heads, Heads, Heads,Heads, Heads, Heads, Heads, Heads, Heads. My expectation of Randi would be that he's the kind of guy who would claim that HHHHHHHHHH is just a likely a sequence as any other sequence of 10 flips, ergo its not paranormal. Just my opinion.
Do you not shop at stores that tag their clothes with shoplifting detectors? Get a clue. That shoplifting technology saves money for the honest among us.
Do not go thinking that even that technology cannot be without drawbacks to legit customers.
One case where I bought something, the cashier rang it up and put it in a bag. I got it home and discovered an antitheft tag still on the item. And it was the kind of tag that would wreck the item with dye if removed incorrectly. So I had to return to the store to get the tag removed. And this store was a fair distance away. That technology cost me money in gas and time.
There could be an analogy made for WGA. Analysis of the strings in WGA code leads to the conclusion that WGA code can shut down a windows install that WGA thinks is invalid. If WGA is wrong (Microsoft? Bugs? Never!) then a legit copy of Windows may go inactive with a major hassle to get it working again. Even if the owner has the Certificate of Authority. I don't blame people for opting out.
Well, there's also the slight difference that [James Randi] has facts on his side.
Except I don't trust him because I witnessed him cooking statistics of those facts on TV.
IIRC Randi was on Artur C Clark's TV show, Mysterious World, watching a dowsing experiments where things were buried in snow, and passers by were enlisted to try finding things. There were two kinds of trials done. I don't recall the exact differences, but it was something like find things buried in snow, vs deterine when boxes were empty or not.
One kind of trial had a better than guessing result. The other was the same as guessing. Randi averaged the two results to minimize them, even though they were really different experiments. Clark complained about this in his afterword.
I find some merit in the criticism of Randi's CSICOP organization impiled by it satirical twin CSICON
Which according to writer Robert Anton Wilson offers a prize of 1 million irish pounds to anyone who can produce "a normal sunset, an average Beethoven sonata, an ordinary Playmate of the Month, or any thing or event in space-time that qualifies as normal, average or ordinary."
An example of the difficulty in this has been given: "The average Canadian has one testicle, just like Adolf Hitler -- or, more precisely, the average Canadian has 0.96 testicles, an even sadder plight than Hitler's, if the average Anything actually existed." Ergo if you can find a canadian with exactly 0.96 testicles, you could win the prize.
What laws were broken by Lay? "Conspiracy to commit securities fraud and wire fraud." What does that mean exactly? It means that they didn't jump through the regulation hoops the way that your government mandated they do.
and
if the investors want information, they should make sure it is contractually required for the corporation to offer that information. That is the best way to get rid of the problem, not new laws when old contract laws would suffice.
and he misses the point completely.
Under 'old contract laws' they were not allowed to LIE, in other words, commit fraud. The 'hoops' were in place to make it harder to lie. But they went through the extra effort to commit fraud anyway. Without the hoops it would have just been easier. Don't say the regulations caused the Enron debacle. The thieves would have grifted the money another way if the hoops were not there. You declare people who con their employees and investors as immoral. The Enron inner circle did that. Were they less moral because it took more effort to con their victims, or were they just immoral to begin with.
In the 1960's Supermarionation based TV show Thunderbirds, the aircraft were equipted with camera detectors which would help International Rescue keep their technology secret.
I always thought that the idea of a camera detector required a little more suspension of disbelief than usual.
That the state of New York (and any other jusridiction with similar laws) slaps Microsoft with the same sort of anti-spyware case that they did to Sony.
Stare decisis gets broken, just recently in fact, as Clarence Thomas has been demonstrating
How odd that you think a concuring opinion by Justice Thomas somehow overturned a precident, when the opinion of the court was the one written by Justice Rehnquist.
IMHO the language J. Rehnquist uses shows respect for the doctorine of Stare Decisis:
To uphold the Government's contentions here, we would have to pile
inference upon inference in a manner that would bid fair to convert
congressional authority under the Commerce Clause to a general police
power of the sort retained by the States. Admittedly, some of our
prior cases have taken long steps down that road, giving great
deference to congressional action. See supra, at 8. The broad language
in these opinions has suggested the possibility of additional
expansion, but we decline here to proceed any further. To do so would
require us to conclude that the Constitution's enumeration of powers
does not presuppose something not enumerated, cf. Gibbons v. Ogden,
supra, at 195, and that there never will be a distinction between
what is truly national and what is truly local, cf. Jones & Laughlin
Steel, supra, at 30. This we are unwilling to do.
Rehnquist's opinion has the court declining to expand congressional powers, but neither does the opinion contract back those powers already ruled constitutional. It declares no previous decision overturned. And you'll note the opinion citing supporting decisions. Stare Decisis in action. btw I have no interest in breaking balls. Its just irksome to me that some people seem intent on undermining the purpose of the judicial branch. Its their job to fill in the gaps of statutory law, not to be mindless robots ruling on the letter of the law rather than the intent.
For example, the infamous Dredd Scott decision was not overturned by judges going "Geesh, WHAT were we thinking?" and making a new ruling, but by the adoption of the 13th Amendment of the US Constitution.
You'd be surprised how the US Supreme Court has warped the Constitution. These precedents get erroneously called the law of the land (even though it isn't the Court's job to write law) and with words like penumbra they may practically speaking write law.
What the Supreme Court makes is called Case Law. Case law has been a part of common law legal system for longer than the U.S. has been in existance.
It is as much the law of the land as statutory law is.
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Actually if I was being handed an ipod that had been hidden by the 'Walken' method, I'd complain if it was merely wiped.
Thats not how Randi's FAQ portrays it. The example given is "Spoon bends or not", not "You have 10 tries to bend the spoon"
but the point stands: ten out of ten heads is less likely than any other outcome (except ten tails).
No, you are still showing a lack of grasp on how probability works. The chance of HHHHHHHHHH is exactly the same as HHHHHHHHHT. This should be obvious because the chance of the 9 heads in both series is the same (identical), so if the 10th flip if 50% one way 50% the other, so the chances of either are still the same.
For the probablities to be different, flips would have to be influenced somehow by previous tosses. Like somehow the coin is thinking 'hmmm, thats a lot of heads in a row, I better toss in a tail to mix it up!". Thats not the way things work.
Are you claiming that someone has met the challenge and Randi has still refused to pay, breaking the agreement? No, but your description of how to conduct a challenge was bogus that way when you said "now let's see you do it again."
From reading his FAQ, it seems that Randi never really proceeds into the official challenge. Instead he does somekind of preliminary test, or declares a claim dangerious or inherently spurious. Some of the examples given seem spurious to me. If a dowser claims they can detect X underground, why does the preliminary test have to be detecting X under a teacup. That implies the ability works in a particular sort of way, that the dowser has a connection to X. But what if alleged ability really workded and it stemmed from detecting distortions in some sort of field charateristic of the earth. The preliminary test would exclude that possibility, ergo Randi is insisting preliminary tests that test something other than the claim.
Randi flat out refused to test a Bretharian claiming that the withholding of food endangered the testee. Now Bretharians are amusingly silly. I recall in the book High Wierdness by Mail how the founder got caught with food wrappers in his room. But is it really so difficult to do a non dangerious test of it. All sorts of body chemestry goes funny when you fast. Just make sure the guy doesn't secretly eat for a few days, and plot things like his blood glucose level. If the values stay level, then the guy is not starving himself, if they go skewed, then he is. You could tell long before there was any danger. The 'too dangerious to test' ruling by Randi just seems like a cop out.
It all smacks of Randi trying to avoid actual tests, not because he would lose, but because they would be a pain in the ass to administer. That may be human nature, but you can't claim its scientific.
Wow! You mean you've identified the ACTUAL direct advantage that immediately benefits the legal licencee in direct consequence of his installing WGA vs not installing it? Not an indirect benefit, like 'Whats good for Microsoft is good for the USA' or benefit used as a euphensism, as in 'Say, nice store you got here. Be a shame if something were to happen to it. Consider the benefits of subscribing to our neighborhood watch program'.
Cool! No one else seems to have. Please share.
Flatlander Woman.
So if they hypothetically only had a success rate of (pull number from air) 85%, they wouldn't be worth hiring just on the fair odds that their assay would be helpful?
I think you oversimplify how the world works. At some fee that level of accuracy would be worthwhile. The world is not binary.
I don't think a guy who could guess 50 cards right in a shuffled deck is that much less spooky than the guy who could guess a whole 52 card deck? A little maybe, but not much. I sure wouldn't play poker with him! :)
Except [10 coin flips resulting in heads in a row] not as likely as any other sequence, so Alternate Universe Randi would be wrong.
Dude, go back to school. There are 2 to the tenth power possible sequences of 10 coin flips. Think of it as a 10 bit binary number. if the coin is truly 50%/50% then every sequence of 10 tosses has the exact same probablity: 1 out of 1024. That includes the all heads 10 coin sequence.
So the next step would be to say, "OK, that was cool, now let's see you do it again.
Aren't Randi's contracts very yodaish? "Do or Do not, there is no try". Thats what his FAQ says (without using Yoda as a adjective) If the feat Randi contracted for was to be 10 controlled flips, a reasonable person would expect Randi to pay then an there. No 'OK! one more time!'.
Your performance as one of Randi's fans, with statistics bobbles and welching on contracts if your expectations are not met sure doesn't lead me to be changing my mind on Randi's character anytime soon. Basicallly your worldview is unscientific, with 'experiments' biased by the observer, spinning the results.
Being dead, the chance of a dupicate error is rather more remote than a teller screwing up removing a dye spurting anti-shoplift tag. So do you really think you can make the situation analogy really parallel?
Beyond that the valve is really part of the 'product' not an temporary aspect of the process. I never proposed eliminating the product.
Lets see if your analogy can be adjusted. Perhaps the surgeon uses his nifty new laser scapel to do the operation, and its set a tad too high and slices right into the heart. Why yes, indeed I might pick skipping the laser scapel, and sticking with a regular scapel for operation part deux.
Come to think of it, if a store body cavity searched me on a daily basis (no matter how gentle), analogous to WGA's daily delve into my whole system followed by a phone home, I DO think I might stop shopping there.
How about you?
You seem to be confusing proximate cause with primary cause or even sole cause.
Lets set up an A/B comparison, and see which factor elimination results in the problem not occuring again.
A) Eliminate the employee. Can situation happen again? YES. Diffiernt employee can make the same mistake.
B) Eliminate that particular tag system. Can situation happen again? NO. The possibility of making that particular mistake is eliminated.
Still looks to me as if that sstem cost me money. It might have saved the store something, but that does not automatically help my pocketbook.
As for price, I wonder where you live, because here they charge what they can maximize profit on. The system might reduce their costs, and that means they can lower their price. The ability to do so, by itself, is no inducement to do so. (It is unlikely in rge incident under discussion that competition would reduce price, as the item was an impulse buy kind of thing, not a commodity.)
Well, at least the kill switch code has not been enabled yet.
But check out this article In it we have this quote:
So apparently there at 20% WGA validation failures that are not due to leaked or stolen codes. That seems to leave that they were actually valid.You might try googling for "WGA failure Dell"....
Perhaps you should work on your english parsing skills.
I use that incident to form an opinion on James Randi, not on dowsing. My opinion on dowsing is still "I've never seen it, show me"
Yes, one incident of Mr Randi acting unscientific in a situation where they were trying to be scientific is enough to form such an opinion. I continue to hold that opinion in absence of him doing something like apologizing after he'd realized he'd commited a statistcal error. Mr Clark failed to mention any such action on Mr Randi's part.
One might argue about the definition of "average" or "normal", but dowsing and ESP are pretty clear-cut: either you can find buried water or you can't.
Thats rather simplistic. Like Tiger Woods can always hit a hole in one? So if he misses one, then you can say he he's incapible? If the interpretor is cooking the stats, he can always spin to keep his claims safe. Like if someone were to claim the could control the flip of a coin, they either could or not, Right? Lets say someone made that claim, and under controlled conditions with a normal coin was able to produce Heads, Heads, Heads, Heads,Heads, Heads, Heads, Heads, Heads, Heads. My expectation of Randi would be that he's the kind of guy who would claim that HHHHHHHHHH is just a likely a sequence as any other sequence of 10 flips, ergo its not paranormal. Just my opinion.
Do not go thinking that even that technology cannot be without drawbacks to legit customers.
One case where I bought something, the cashier rang it up and put it in a bag. I got it home and discovered an antitheft tag still on the item. And it was the kind of tag that would wreck the item with dye if removed incorrectly. So I had to return to the store to get the tag removed. And this store was a fair distance away. That technology cost me money in gas and time.
There could be an analogy made for WGA. Analysis of the strings in WGA code leads to the conclusion that WGA code can shut down a windows install that WGA thinks is invalid. If WGA is wrong (Microsoft? Bugs? Never!) then a legit copy of Windows may go inactive with a major hassle to get it working again. Even if the owner has the Certificate of Authority. I don't blame people for opting out.
Except I don't trust him because I witnessed him cooking statistics of those facts on TV.
IIRC Randi was on Artur C Clark's TV show, Mysterious World, watching a dowsing experiments where things were buried in snow, and passers by were enlisted to try finding things. There were two kinds of trials done. I don't recall the exact differences, but it was something like find things buried in snow, vs deterine when boxes were empty or not.
One kind of trial had a better than guessing result. The other was the same as guessing. Randi averaged the two results to minimize them, even though they were really different experiments. Clark complained about this in his afterword.
I find some merit in the criticism of Randi's CSICOP organization impiled by it satirical twin CSICON
Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal
Which according to writer Robert Anton Wilson offers a prize of 1 million irish pounds to anyone who can produce "a normal sunset, an average Beethoven sonata, an ordinary Playmate of the Month, or any thing or event in space-time that qualifies as normal, average or ordinary."
An example of the difficulty in this has been given: "The average Canadian has one testicle, just like Adolf Hitler -- or, more precisely, the average Canadian has 0.96 testicles, an even sadder plight than Hitler's, if the average Anything actually existed." Ergo if you can find a canadian with exactly 0.96 testicles, you could win the prize.
Consider how you might be mod'ed if you reply truthfully to your significant other's question of "Does this make me look fat?"
The KGB had an injector that used precious metals and compressed gas to deliver its payload long long ago.
What laws were broken by Lay? "Conspiracy to commit securities fraud and wire fraud." What does that mean exactly? It means that they didn't jump through the regulation hoops the way that your government mandated they do.
and
if the investors want information, they should make sure it is contractually required for the corporation to offer that information. That is the best way to get rid of the problem, not new laws when old contract laws would suffice.
and he misses the point completely.
Under 'old contract laws' they were not allowed to LIE, in other words, commit fraud. The 'hoops' were in place to make it harder to lie. But they went through the extra effort to commit fraud anyway. Without the hoops it would have just been easier. Don't say the regulations caused the Enron debacle. The thieves would have grifted the money another way if the hoops were not there. You declare people who con their employees and investors as immoral. The Enron inner circle did that. Were they less moral because it took more effort to con their victims, or were they just immoral to begin with.
The latter seems the obivious answer to me.
It would be a 127.0.0.1 gauge if used to commit suicide.
I always thought that the idea of a camera detector required a little more suspension of disbelief than usual.
I guess Gerry Anderson is now vindicated.
No, they are made of the same stuff that inkjet printer ink is made from.
Yes, really.
That the state of New York (and any other jusridiction with similar laws) slaps Microsoft with the same sort of anti-spyware case that they did to Sony.
How odd that you think a concuring opinion by Justice Thomas somehow overturned a precident, when the opinion of the court was the one written by Justice Rehnquist.
IMHO the language J. Rehnquist uses shows respect for the doctorine of Stare Decisis:
Rehnquist's opinion has the court declining to expand congressional powers, but neither does the opinion contract back those powers already ruled constitutional. It declares no previous decision overturned. And you'll note the opinion citing supporting decisions. Stare Decisis in action.
btw I have no interest in breaking balls. Its just irksome to me that some people seem intent on undermining the purpose of the judicial branch. Its their job to fill in the gaps of statutory law, not to be mindless robots ruling on the letter of the law rather than the intent.
More rarely than you seem to think. Stare Decisis and Jurisprudence Constante are an integral part of our legal system.
For example, the infamous Dredd Scott decision was not overturned by judges going "Geesh, WHAT were we thinking?" and making a new ruling, but by the adoption of the 13th Amendment of the US Constitution.
What the Supreme Court makes is called Case Law. Case law has been a part of common law legal system for longer than the U.S. has been in existance.
It is as much the law of the land as statutory law is.
A Møøse once bit my sister ...
Don't you mean that you lost the token, so the ring does not work anymore?
(From an old Dilbert comic IIRC)
Obligitory Skynet joke in
5...4...3...2...1