Talk:Proactionary Principle

Neologisms have to be dealt with via VfD. Sorry. Denni &#9775; 2005 July 6 23:43 (UTC)


 * For the archived vfd discussion of this page see Votes for deletion/Proactionary Principle -- Francs2000 | Talk [[Image:Flag of the United Kingdom.svg|25px| ]] 02:04, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

Unfortunately I missed the VfD - and would have assumed it would go down the plughole where it belongs, but anon contributions ensured it didn't. Even "proactionary" on its own gets only 624 Google hits total, and the article states the term was coined in 2004! It's a neologism if ever there was one. Rd232 20:54, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
 * Actually, if you look up the VfD, tally the votes, and remove the anonymous or otherwise objected to "Keep" votes, it still comes out to 3 votes Keep versus 3 votes Delete. Even if you assume vote-stuffing on the part of the keepers, and that all objected-to Keep votes should be removed, that's still no consensus to delete.
 * It would have been 4:3 if I'd been around to vote. Rd232 07:33, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

As one of the voters on the VfD said, even if this term itself is new, people have been thinking this way for a while.
 * Irrelevant. See WP:NOR. Rd232 07:33, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

deterministic nature?
I had never even heard of this before navigating here from the featured-article-of-the-day on Transhumanism.

From the article:


 * The mathematical concept of probability itself is no more than a method of quantifying human ignorance.  Yet it is apparent, from many centuries of successful physics, that nature is not random but follows a set of deterministic laws.

Ach, that opens a real can of worms. Most quantum physicists would say that nature is indeed random, although there are some philosophical interpretations that attempt to remove the randomness.

Quantum weirdness may not be directly relevant to the Proactionary Principle, but surely this can be rewritten in such a manner that the discussion does not depend on what many would regard as a factually incorrect statement.

It's also somewhat negligent to introduce this argument without discussion of chaos, which is practically indistinguishable from randomness.

The two issues of quantum weirdness and chaos do a real double whammy on the "nature is not random" statement. Quantum weirdness means the statement is technically false whether or not it's practically correct, and chaos means the statement is practically false whether or not it's technically correct.

IMO, the article would not suffer if those two sentences were simply deleted. If they are not simply deleted, they must certainly be fixed.

Capedia 07:12, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress
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