kaya3

It's a bit like asking how we can consider Newcastle to be in the North of England, when there is no universally agreed line separating the North from the Midlands. That's not a problem when every line people draw still has Newcastle unambiguously in the North. The debate over which line is correct and which cities are on which sides of that line, does not need to be resolved before we can affirm that Newcastle is in the North.

Likewise, there might be debate over which exact line to draw between astrology and science, because some lines might have things on one side which people think should be on the other side. But that isn't a problem for science vs. astrology either, because all the lines being drawn put astrology on one side and science on the other; the disagreement over which line is correct, doesn't impact the conclusion for astrology, even if it might impact the conclusion for other cases.

Sure, each demarcation line you might draw between astrology and science will have its debatable edge cases, which means that there may be a demarcation problem for those edge cases. It doesn't mean the same problem applies for astrology, because astrology isn't one of those debatable edge cases.

The "demarcation problem" means it can be difficult to classify items which do not clearly fall on either side of a demarcation line, or where the choice of demarcation line is controversial in some way. Neither of those problems actually exists in the demarcation between astrology and science.

It does not appear that I have had any trouble reconciling with your observation, since there is no other observation which it would need to be reconciled with anyway.

As I said, c = 1 in natural units, is certainly not equal to your calculation in units of m/s, and could equal anything you like if humans were to choose different units than metres and seconds. c could equal pi if we wanted it to, but we don't. No explanation is needed for the fact that you can combine arbitrary numbers together in an arbitrary way and get a close approximation for c; on the contrary, an explanation would be needed if the number 299,735,540 did have some cosmic significance, because this number really just describes the units of "metre" and "second" invented by humans.

For example, pi^2 / 3 is a very close approximation to Rydberg's constant, with an error of about 0.0008% - much better than your result, and I'm sure if you put your mind to it you could tell just as fanciful a story about why pi^2 / 3 is a very natural calculation to do. But likewise, we have measured Rydberg's constant precisely enough to know that it is not pi^2 / 3, it is different by about 0.0008%.

Humanity has, in fact, seen this many times.

There is no coincidence, there are just two numbers which are fairly close but definitely not equal. They do not actually coincide.

The idea that physicists might have gotten the speed of light wrong by 0.02% is almost as laughable as the idea that mathematicians might have gotten pi wrong by 0.02%.

In fact, we measured it so precisely that nowadays the metre is defined as the distance light travels in 1/c seconds. So in some sense the speed of light is known perfectly accurately and cannot be measured, and any error when attempting to measure it is really an error in your metre or your second.

I think it is also worth mentioning that if your computed value for the speed of light has an error of 0.02% compared to the measured speed of light, then your computed value is simply wrong by 0.02%. We have measured the speed of light much more accurately than that.

And yours is arbitrarily derived from the fact that humans have 10 fingers and measure things in metres and seconds. The only universal value for the speed of light, ignoring arbitrary human units, is 1.

The speed of light is 1 Planck length per Planck time. No need for numerology.

@Servaes I said "to suffer, be harmed, be sinned against, or so on".

Moral agency is the wrong thing to consider here. Moral agency is about one's capacity to make decisions or perform actions with moral status or moral consequences. What matters here is one's capacity to suffer, be harmed, be sinned against, or so on. I don't know of a moral framework which says that agency is a necessary condition for suffering.

AFAICT, this question boils down to a simple one: "if change only happens with time, how could change happen without time?" And then the answer is obvious: these two notions are in plain contradiction and you must reject one. Supposing (as the question does) that we don't reject the latter, then we must reject the former by adopting a broader definition of "change" that doesn't require time. For instance, if you are comfortable with the idea of a gradient's colour changing over space rather than time, then it seems you can have change without time.

@Steve The only way for you to assert that you have given enough information for a sensible person to understand what you mean, is if you say everyone commenting or answering here is not sensible, because it seems nobody other than you understands what you are asking.

There is no difference between the type system of SQL and the type system of SQL, though. What about SQL makes it not an answer to your question? Yes, clearly, I'm not understanding something about what you want to know, which is why you need to clarify. You are asking "about some unspecified language which, although presumably not SQL, nevertheless aligns sufficiently with SQL concepts that there is no "impedance mismatch"". If it's only presumably not SQL, then you haven't ruled out SQL as a possible answer. And I don't see anything else which rules out SQL.

@Steve Well, as I said, there are lots of languages where there is no "object-relational impedance mismatch", as that is only a feature of OO languages. And SQL itself is a non-OO language which is used clientside.

Of course, the other answer is that a lot of applications do use client-side SQL databases. For example, Google Chrome stores your history, cookies etc. in an SQLite database; SQLite is also used by the rpm and Nix package managers on the client-side.

Basically, because SQL is not as expressive as other paradigms. You can resolve the "object-relational impedance mismatch" by adopting other paradigms besides OO without just writing everything in SQL, and if you do stick with OO then the "impedance mismatch" is often an acceptable cost.

@WeatherVane See Guidance on the use of domestic CCTV. One requirement is "putting up a notice informing people that recording is taking place". In the scenario described by this question, that isn't done; Bob records Sue without her knowledge.

The two wrongs described in the question are the filming without consent, and the false accusation. But neither party can plausibly say that their criminal act was justified by the other's criminal act, because each party committed their crime without knowledge of the other crime. Bob recorded the film before Sue made her false accusation, and Sue made her false accusation before she knew about the film. In the usual sense of the phrase "two wrongs don't make a right", the second wrong is done with the intention to correct the first wrong, but that isn't the case here.

It is not question begging, you are just reading my words as if they are an argument for a different conclusion than what I have stated. It doesn't matter how the individual dice are able to obey a distribution; so long as you accept that the distribution of the sum of the two dice is different to the distributions of the individual dice, then there is a new distribution with no physical entity keeping track of that distribution. Even if you believe the individual dice "keep track" of their own distributions, what physical entity keeps track of the distribution of their sum?

Then, given that a distribution can be obeyed without anything keeping track for that distribution, why should we suppose it is necessary that anything keeps track for any other distribution? We have already shown that it is not necessary for this particular distribution, therefore you cannot claim it is necessary for distributions in general.

@user80226 The point is to show that distributions don't need anything "kept track of" in order to be followed. A system of two dice obeys a distribution which neither die individually obeys, neither die is responsible for or capable of "keeping track" of what that distribution is supposed to produce in the long run, and a human adding the result of the two dice in their head doesn't magically create some other physical entity which "keeps track" of the dice together to ensure the distribution is obeyed in the long run. So a distribution is followed without any "keeping track".

But even if a real, non-ideal, physical die does not roll independent, identically distributed outcomes, there is still a probability distribution associated with each separate roll of that die. It's just that the distributions for each separate roll might be different, and we don't necessarily know what those distributions are, and it might not be physically possible to sample any individual one of those distributions more than once (if doing so somehow changes the physical state of the die, or the universe in which the die is rolled). But they are distributions nonetheless.

When you don't abstract away the usual physical details, it may well be the case that repeated rolls of a real, non-ideal, physical die are not independent or identically distributed. Nonetheless, that doesn't refute the concept of a probability distribution, because a probability distribution is an abstract mathematical object, not something which exists in reality. Just as the number 17 exists in the ontology of mathematics, so does the uniform discrete distribution on six elements. How can we know a physical die exhibits that distribution? Only by statistical tests and inductive reasoning.

I think the part you are hung up on is the idea that probability distributions must be manifested in physical objects, such as dice. The answer is that they don't need to be, because "random processes" are not the same thing as "probability distributions". As the last part of my answer states, "It also doesn't have to be physically possible to take independent samples from a distribution."

@user80226 It doesn't matter where your random inputs come from. If you don't believe in dice, add the radioactive decay times of two unstable nuclei, or whatever else you prefer. You are picking at things which are not relevant to the point.

@user80226 The thought experiment doesn't change if the dice aren't fair, only the numbers (perhaps 7 could be five or sixteen times as likely as 12, with unfair dice). Either way, it is the numbers you get on the two dice, and the rule for combining those into one outcome, which determines the result - not some kind of hidden state remembered by the system of two dice which is somehow separate to the individual dice. And if no "keeping track" is required for the system of two dice to obey a probability distribution, why should any "keeping track" be required for the individual dice?

@keshlam I guess you mean "no more improbable"? Yes, all of that exactly.

Enjoy your day.

Anyway, I am going to eat

Forget about the future, forget about repeated trials, probabilities don't have to mean that and usually don't

No, you are confusing the statement "F(X) follows a distribution Y" with "F(X) follows a distribution Y and I know exactly what Y is"

The number 0.2 doesn't need to be interpreted as representing anything about repeated trials. It could be interpreted as meaning, if I were forced to offer bets on the outcome to other people who have the same knowledge as me, then I'd offer odds of 1 in 5.

And it is meaningless to talk about the long-run distribution of outcomes, because this whole scenario is a setup and nobody is ever going to put us in a room with five apples again.

And it is not wrong for me to assign those numbers! Nor is it wrong for someone else who knows more than me to assign the numbers 0 and 1 instead

Like the case of five apples with one poisoned. It might be the case that you always choose the nearest apple and the furthest one is poisoned. But without me knowing those two facts, nothing stops me from assigning the number 0.2 to the outcome that you take the poisoned one and 0.8 to the outcome that you don't.

But without self-reference (which usually requires the adversary to be omniscient, or telepathic, or be able to predict the future), you can still assign a probability distribution to a deterministic situation when you don't know what the determined outcome will be. You can even associate a probability distribution when the outcome is already determined but you haven't learned it yet.

Probabilities are not very good models for adversarial situations where the adversary makes decisions based on strategies which you decide by assigning probabilities to the adversary's actions, and there are a number of paradoxes based on that kind of thing. But that's really just saying that self-referential definitions often lead to paradoxes.

That number might be 0.

Just as I can say there is an unknown number of cookies in this jar. There is still a number even though I don't know what it is

You can still say that there is a distribution which you know nothing about.

I think you are stuck on the idea of probabilities representing "long-term" rates of non-deterministic outcomes over repeated trials, but there is no need to interpret probabilities that way. Things can have probabilities even if you only ever sample them once. And deterministic things can also have probabilities, firstly because 0 and 1 are probabilities, secondly because of imperfect information

It is not begging the question to say that X and Y represent random variables, any more than it is to say x and y represent numbers. If you doubt that random variables exist, then what did you mean X and Y to stand for? Of course, if you don't doubt that numbers exist, then it is hard to doubt that random variables do

That's what my answer is about, the fact that there can be a different distribution associated with each step of a random process, and in fact that is the definition of a random process

If you accept that there was a number of apples before and a different number of apples afterwards, then you can just as well accept that there was a distribution before and a different distribution afterwards.