It's inconceivable!

[paigetheoracle]

Before any great scientific or technical advance, history's attitude as we go back in time from the present is 'It works!' 'It's possible with a little tweaking' 'It's a good idea but- ' 'It'll never work!' 'What's " _ "? (gravity etc.) e.g. Aircraft 'It'll never get off the ground!'

 

Are there any inventions/ work in progress (if only in theory) that might have seemed impossible in the past and is pretty hard to believe in now, that you can see coming into the public arena in the near future? (official secrets/commercially sensitive issues, excluded).

 

Question two (related) - how can you tell when you are being prejudiced against something, rather than realistic or are they the same thing? (To me prejudice is a defence mechanism that lumps things together as being the same, whereas science is about separating and distinguishing parts of a system or whole and seeing how they relate and what they really do as opposed to what they seem to do).

[Tormod]

Gravity works but nobody knows why. I think it is conveivable that we'll find out in the not-so-distant future.

 

Your second question is however inconceivable to me.

[CraigD]

Are there any inventions/ work in progress (if only in theory) that might have seemed impossible in the past and is pretty hard to believe in now, that you can see coming into the public arena in the near future?

My guess is that computers with human-like or even human-superior self-models – “true” AIs - are in this category.

how can you tell when you are being prejudiced against something, rather than realistic …?

You can examine each assertion in your objection to that something, then examine each assertion in support of those assertions, and so on. If any of these assertions are along the lines of “because I just know it to be so,” you are likely being prejudiced.

 

I think it’s important to note that the correlation between being prejudiced and being incorrect is not a perfect one. A rigorously supported argument for or against a proposition may be incorrect, while a poorly supported one may be correct. One must, therefore, be careful to avoid the fallacy:

Argument A for B is flawed;

Therefore B is false.

 

One must also avoid the complementary fallacy:

Argument A for B is flawed;

Argument C concludes that therefore B is false;

Argument C is a fallacy;

Therefore B is true.

[paigetheoracle]

I think it’s important to note that the correlation between being prejudiced and being incorrect is not a perfect one. A rigorously supported argument for or against a proposition may be incorrect, while a poorly supported one may be correct.

 

One must also avoid the complementary fallacy:

Argument A for B is flawed;

Argument C concludes that therefore B is false;

Argument C is a fallacy;

Therefore B is true.

 

This is the one I like because it is then the beer glasses start flying

"You calling me a liar?"

 

It's true that you can know the truth but not convince others and conversely, talk yourself into believing something untrue is true, simply because it is to your advantage to believe it (corruption and cowardice).

[paigetheoracle]

Gravity works but nobody knows why. I think it is conveivable that we'll find out in the not-so-distant future.

 

Your second question is however inconceivable to me.

 

:)

[Doctordick]

:cup:

Actually, I find your second question to be the most basic question any competent scientist should keep in mind at all times as it sets the very boundarys of any worthwhile examination. I am very impressed with the way you think. You need to be educated: i.e., you should set your goal in life to acquire as much knowledge you can as you sound like a person who could make good use of it.

 

Have fun -- Dick

 

Knowledge is Power and power corrupts

corruption is the abuse of power and -

the most common abuse of the power of knowledge is to use it to hide ones stupidity -

I believe that is exactly what your question is all about.

[CraigD]

It's true that you can know the truth but not convince others and conversely, talk yourself into believing something untrue is true, simply because it is to your advantage to believe it (corruption and cowardice).

I experience a very clear case of the latter phenomena in a professional training seminar during the mid 1990s. A popular training exercise of these days was HSI’s “Desert Survival Simulations”. In these exercises, you must chose the order in which you will salvage listed items in order to survive some dangerous situation – typically a plane crash in a remote wilderness – the assumption being that you don’t have time to save everything before the plane burns/sinks/etc. First, each participant orders (on a paper form) the items to the best of their ability. Then, the participants collaborate to order the items according to the group consensus. The forms are then scored according to their closeness to an ordering made by acknowledged survival experts. The point of the exercise is not to teach survival techniques, but to show that a team of people perform better on this, or nearly any sort of test, than any individual team member. This is known as “synergy”.

 

After I and the 10 or so people on my team had completed our forms, we began comparing and discussing them, following the guidelines we’d been given. One of my team members jokingly said “Craig’s pretty good at these sorts of things – let’s just do what he says”. We laughed this suggestion off, and proceeded to discuss and complete our team ordering. After it was complete, I was confident it was an improvement on my original one.

 

Upon scoring, we discovered (to the dismay of our trainers) that our team had scored lower than both me individually, and the person who joked that we should just use mine. Had we followed his suggestion, we would have done better than we did by forming a “synergistic” consensus. The other 2-4 teams showed the expected improvement, though their scores were still lower than our two individual scores.

 

This was perplexing to me, because I honestly felt that I’d not been cowardly, corrupt, or knuckled under to peer pressure. I honestly expected our group score to be better than my individual score. In retrospect, we could see where we’d made mistakes, but at the time, we were oblivious to them.

 

I attempted to learn more about these sorts of tests, and under what circumstances what happened to us occurred, but despite HIS’s claim that the “synergy” effect, and their materials, were the product of extensive academic research, couldn’t find any detailed non-commercial references to it.

[Qfwfq]

Obviously Craig, while it will usually be true that many minds will call attention to more ideas and avoid individual mistakes, there may be cases in which the individual fares better and doesn't persuade the others effectively of his reasons.

 

I once heard gossip among colleagues about a famed multinational consultance company, according to them that firm uses the test in selection of new employees but to quite a different purpose. The lists are not assayed by survival experts at all, each individual simply gets a score that is higher, according to how close their own list is to that of the group they were in... :Alien:

 

Question two (related) - how can you tell when you are being prejudiced against something, rather than realistic or are they the same thing?

They're certainly not the same thing, but there is no infallible general criterion against letting one's own bias prevail. Experience and practice are useful, just try to notice where you might be letting influence in and, of course, you must fully want to be objective otherwise you never will be.