User talk:Art LaPella/Devil's Dictionary of Wikipedia Policy

Original research
==Hi! I really like your definition of NPOV and want to comment for a reason. There are or maybe only used to be people who liked to read and in doing so came into contact with people like Dr, Isaac Asimov who thought and said that if you read and think (synthesize ideas), and that some of those ideas might be worthy of further discussion. He then proceeded to throw out and sell Science Fiction ideas for a while and then change to science ideas because the pay was better, and in the process he evidently brainwashed a lot of young minds into a "dilusion of adequacy" related to their ability to understand the purported ideas of really intelligent people. So weve got these information hungry people running around looking for an explanation of everything and your involved in the process of explaining everything in terms of what a cosensus of people think about it. And if the subject matter were intellectual that sounds like a reasonable idea. But the subject matter is the factual history and future of science and physical reality and what is needed is a maximum effort to accurately determine things and events and avoid things like mathematical absurdities and paradoxes And I compliment you for trying to manage human nature in this process. But I think that a modified Boolean logic computer program might be the way to go. I note that Newton's analysis of the motion of the moon didn't say he couldn't figure it out. He merely said that he was unable to handle all the variables. WFPMWFPM (talk) 21:13, 13 October 2008 (UTC)
 * First, you seem to overestimate my role at Big Bang. I'm there for basic proofreading, and to re-re-re-re-explain the basic rules of Wikipedia, so the scientists won't be distracted by that repetitive task. No original research is definitely intended to apply to "factual history and future of science and physical reality". "a maximum effort to accurately determine things and events and avoid things like mathematical absurdities and paradoxes" is achieved by reporting opinions of recognized scientists, not the multitudes who show up at Wikipedia to insist that everyone else is wrong, as at Talk:Mathematical analysis/Archive 1. The Devil's Dictionary points out "recognized scientist" is debatable, but you haven't cited anyone at all for your proposed change to the Big Bang article (whatever that change may be). And I don't understand why you keep advocating computerization. Do you want to push a button, and have an unaided computer tell us if there was really a Big Bang? Cosmologists use computers for limited purposes, but don't you understand that artificial intelligence hasn't yet advanced nearly enough for your purpose? Art LaPella (talk) 01:19, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

===I think that what I am doing, in a very unorganized human manner, of course, is admiring the growth process of the ability of computer programming science to analyze and make intelligent decisions about diverse subject matters in spite of the relative simplicity of their rules and decision making processes. And I notice that they are not peer pressure driven and the idea is king. And their ability to list and maintain control of the related supoposedly factual information; plus even quantified speculation about the correctness thereof appeals to me. And No is still No in Computerese. Not the ststistical possibilities of "tunneling", or the possibility of the tail end of a distribution curve, Which I consider to be human ideas discussed in at least an intelligent manner. But they dont have "intuition", which I also admire and whioh the rules wont permit them to have. I remember the computer problem of generating a random number where you do want the computer to generate a truly random number (for the pi approximation program), but for debugging purposes you wanted the computer to allways generate the same random number. That took a lot of computer programming effort and my little Casio cant do it. So when we get into discussions about the relative correctness (dubious criteria) about real things I have a tendency to think "What would a computer program do if it were in my decision predicament". WFPMWFPM (talk) 07:39, 14 October 2008 (UTC) ===Your last discussion about cosmology is illuminating. You say that cosmologists use computers for limited purposes. what you mean is that Cosmologists tell the computers "I make up the rules and you do the calculating!" And dont you start suggesting that it might be simpler (for programming purposes) if we merely start with a large volume of diffuse energy and then wait till all comes together in the center and see what happens and then wonder why it isn't back at a new diffuse condition at time T=2T. Or if the fact that the atomic mass particles are divided into two oposite spin categories has anything to do with anything. In other words dont think and just do your job amd calculate. WFPMWFPM (talk) 08:54, 14 October 2008 (UTC) === Oh yes and then the Mathemeticians come along and say, "I dont have time right now to think about more scientific problems, but I'm being paid to think about mathematics and I've got this problem of determining the smallest Skewes number and/or maybe winning $100,000 for finding a bigger Mersenne prime number, so I want you to spend your spare time doing these repetitive calculations and dont you break down or wear out. So I keep wondering as to the overall program management as to who is running the show about finding out about things. WFPMWFPM (talk) 15:20, 14 October 2008 (UTC) === And finally, as a person who owns etf funds and has read your QOL article, I think that your analysis of risk assessment discusses the subject matter well as to most details, maybe better than in science, but leaves out the "distributed risks" value factor as well as the merits/demerits of decision making based upon consensus decisions. See, I can obfuscate too. But I'm trying, and your trying, and let's hope for the best. WFPMWFPM (talk) 19:54, 14 October 2008 (UTC)
 * You advocate computerizing cosmology, but I don't think you have an idea for changing the Big Bang article at all. If that is correct, that would be a more appropriate discussion for a cosmology blog than for Wikipedia, except (once again) for the obvious problem: the required software, and probably the required hardware, won't be ready for generations. Suppose I agreed to everything you say: what would happen then? Wikipedia wouldn't change unless we can cite references. And I don't have 22nd century artificial intelligence software in my back pocket that is capable of replacing cosmologists. Oh, and to start a paragraph, hit enter; then use a colon if you want it indented. Equal signs, before and after, are used to make headings. Art LaPella (talk) 01:15, 15 October 2008 (UTC)
 * ==No I just wanted to start at T=zero with whatever physical condition you want to start with. Just as I would have a gravitational system start with mass and location and calculated potential energy of accumulation as Maxwell suggested. But I dont know about this space expansion business and my mind is boggled by the concept that the universe is bigger than any volume you can achieve by expanding at the velocity of light. My initial spherical volume concept had a diameter of 10E4 Megaparsecs, and contained 5.2x10E11 cubic MPC. or 5.2 cubic MPC per presumed existent Galaxy. And The graphics showed Galactic cluster volumes as kind of cumulous cloud volumes with galaxy densities > 1Galaxy/cubic MPC so that sounded reasonable. Now I'm told that the Universe is much larger than that and is expanding even more. But They're not talking about more Galaxies. And I dont have much time to wait and see so I take my ire out on you and I appologize. WFPMWFPM (talk) 06:28, 15 October 2008 (UTC)WFPMWFPM (talk) 06:45, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

OK, you want me to specify a physical condition at T=zero. Nobody knows, but if you give me a moment of prayer, I'll ask. More seriously, I think you want me to specify some of the usual guesses, which you understand better that I do. Like an infinite mass at a point. Or a quantum fluctuation the size of a basketball before the measuring sticks shrink. Or something like that. Then you want to write a program that determines what would happen next. But what laws of nature would that program use for something infinite, or almost infinite? It seems likely that just as (I think) Maxwell's laws apply only to charged particles, there could easily be laws of nature that only apply to infinite or near-infinite density. The metaphor I've used before is that we're like artificially intelligent chess programs for whom a chess game is the entire known universe. We might argue that the chess game couldn't have a beginning because no legal chess move puts pieces on the board. So whatever laws of nature you want to use in your program, I don't believe them. But let's pretend I did believe them. I think your next step would be to show that the simulation wouldn't evolve into the modern universe. Then what? Do we ask Wikipedia to print our original research? That would be more impossible than getting some scientific journal to print it. Art LaPella (talk) 20:42, 15 October 2008 (UTC)
 * No! No! I dont understand it better than you do! I'm asking wWheaton all about this and he's telling me, and I'm only trying to get you as an editor to not defend the theory but just show it with all its ugly warts so ordinary people can see what we're being asked to believe here. I'm an Engineer interested in the atom???? which I blame on Asimov. (everybody to his own folly) And his MO was to take up a subject and write about it and keep writing and explore it to the hopefully rational bitter end, and then make a joke or two about it and then sell it as an article or a book to his readers. And his most enjoyable characteristic was that he really wanted you to understand. And here you are creating an encyclopaedia of knowledge plus with a solicitation to everyone to get in there and constructively contribute where you're interested And I run into a system of more or less indifference as to whether the reader is able to understand it (technically that is). And Asimov didn't just write about science. He could do the same thing for Mathematics. So we cant use my relative poor ability to follow mathematical arguments as an excuse to excuse mathematical discussions from a requirement for an understandable explanation. In fact, those kind of explanations should, if anything be especially discussed, as Asimov did, in order to help the less sophisticated readers. WFPMWFPM (talk) 22:20, 15 October 2008 (UTC)
 * You should explain that a Chess game involves the setting up a model of a complex matrix of possible moves by two people leading to three possible results. The rules are relatively simple but the width of the front of possible moves rapidly becomes very large (big mathematical explanation here) and the game strategy requires that you keep your side steered in the direction of the maximum probability of success. Then there's a a big partly mathematical discussion about decision making about how to truncate certain strategies and keep your view of the "game strategy horizon" to be longer than that of your opponent. And if that sounds too complicated you should explain that the same explanation applies to checkers and so you should play checkers like I do because it's a good game but much simpler. WFPMWFPM (talk) 22:46, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

"My initial spherical volume concept had a diameter of 10E4 Megaparsecs ... " but you don't understand it better? Sorry, I don't have an initial spherical volume concept, although I suppose I could have been a cosmologist if I had made different choices. If your point is that the Big Bang article should be explained more simply, I think most every article should be explained more simply – see the "Encyclopedic" entry for instance in my Devil's Dictionary. The scientists wouldn't cooperate, but perhaps you would prefer Big Bang. My point about chess is that its setup goes by completely different rules than the rest of the game, so I don't see what the size of the game tree has to do with it. My analogy is that conservation of mass/energy, for instance, is like the rule that you can only move one piece per turn (except castling) - that rule doesn't apply to setting up the board, and similarly we can't be sure that mass/energy was conserved at t=0 (if there even was a t=0). Art LaPella (talk) 23:48, 15 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Chess is different than science. There isn't any setup at the beginning of the game. Time chronology has nothing to do with it. It's a game on intellectual strategy involving analysis that you should be good at. Science is about things and related events, and involves "sequentual casuality". People railed against physical laws because they implied "determinism", which was a very bad word in precomputer days. But now science has evolved a set of pretty good and rational rules and is trying to apply them to the presumably real physical things, and their, related activities. And let's just take the rule about the difference between something and nothing (lucretious). Science says those are mutually exclusive things. One being an entity and the other a nonentity. And as far as I'm concerned we have a 3 spacial dimensioned real physical universe which is related to things and their historical events by one evolutionary time continuim as discussed by Zeno and Maxwell. And so there are measurement difficulties as discussed by Lorentz and Weyl and Einstein. But there must be a real universe. Although I'm fully aware that what I do is synthesize a nonentity, namely an idea, that allows me to think and function. And I get angry at Mathematicians in the field of science when they pursue the scientific impossibilities of natural phenomena to the bitter end and divide by zero as it were. We've even got mathematical concepts concerning various degrees of "infinity" as discussed by Asimov but I dont think that's science. So when you talk about scientific things and related events, let's try to keep the discussion understandable, And when Mathematics starts going off the deep end let's take note of that. My concept of the universe was I thought reasonable. The smallest space cube was 1cubic MPC, which was 1/523,000,000 000th of the whole and yet would include both the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxies. and with only 1 /523,000,000th of the whole I could include Whirlpool Galaxy. Incidently Edwin Hubble grew up in Marshfield Missouri and I've got a set of the 9th Edit of EB that I bought there. Do you see any coincidence in that? WFPMWFPM (talk) 02:25, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

I agree that things like transfinite numbers aren't useful. That's why in 1973 I gave up my studies for a PhD in pure mathematics, and studied for a relatively ordinary job in computer programming. Cosmology isn't too useful either because we need space travel first; it doesn't really matter what's in the Whirlpool Galaxy if we can't go there. Is Marshfield, Missouri a coincidence, or is it a Sign from Above? Unless I get an announcement from an angel chorus, there are others who are much more qualified than I, to determine if you are the next Edwin Hubble. Art LaPella (talk) 05:02, 16 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Yeah Me too only I gave up my pursuit of a Masters Degree in Engineering Management because I had to become a field Engineering inspector. Ah! The viscisitudes of life! But I got to help push the state of the art of science during the Moon Landing program and science benefited from that. And personally I think you're in a much better field in Computer Science (as is my eldest son) Than in piddling around in the Alice in wonderland field of mathematics. Just look at what you can do in the field of Capitalist Investment. But you may not have the essential requirement of greed and neither do I. So Cheers. WFPMWFPM (talk) 13:06, 16 October 2008 (UTC) But it does matter what is happening (or was about 25M years ago) in the Whirlpool Galaxy, because that's our model of what the action is/was and it needs to be paid more attention to. WFPMWFPM (talk) 13:11, 16 October 2008 (UTC) And I may not be Edwin Hubble, but I've got my real physical nuclear models, and if I can just keep them in the forum and not archived, maybe some intelligent person will come along and scientifically explain them with the appropriate buzz words and everything. But even I can look at them and see why we have to have opposite spin constituents of the atom in order for the thing to store MVR and still hold together, notwithstanduing all the mathematical explanations about why the nucleus doesn't need to do that because it's just a ball of plasma where nothing touches anything. WFPMWFPM (talk) 13:27, 16 October 2008 (UTC) And Big Bang is amusing and reminds me of the way Asimov occasionally starts out by sucking you in to a subject matter and then showing how a little more extended reasoning could lead you to some important ideas about the subject. Im glad you mentioned it, because I didn't know about it. WFPMWFPM (talk) 14:42, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

I volunteered on a local space research project once, and wrote something that all kinds of people seemed to know about but nobody wanted to talk about. My Devil's Dictionary should give you a clue what it was like. My space fantasies are more capitalist – for more details see Milton Friedman and/or compare NASA's lack of progress since 1969 to the progress of free enterprise computers since then. And if I could just add another order of magnitude to my fortune I could get serious about commercial launching or something. As for your cosmology, once again, have I made it plain enough yet that there are blogs and such where such a proposal would be appropriate, and Wikipedia isn't one of them? If you didn't know about Big Bang perhaps you didn't know about Simple English Wikipedia; Main Page is a good place to start. It's made for foreigners or kids who don't know English very well, although in my experience a kid who is old enough to research using Wikipedia is old enough to need more information than Simple English Wikipedia contains so far. Art LaPella (talk) 22:03, 16 October 2008 (UTC)
 * I've got an idea. Why dont you write a computer game program called "nuclemodel" which is about how you can accumulate magnets on a checkerboard using their innate force of accumulation, because you dont have to imagine that. And you let them touch each other so you dont have to imagine why they shouldn't. And you start in the center of the board, with Red Magnets called "protons" on red and with black magnets called "neutrons" on black. And they all go together in accordance with the "magnet accumulation protocol", which you explain. Then you note that the after 8 Magnets to Model EE4BE8 the 9th magnet doesn't want to bind 2 other side connected magnets (they're like gears) but only likes to bond a lower level of magnets to an upper level of magnets. So that after 2 levels of accumulation the periods of accumulation have to expand to an additional period with 4 additional pairs of magnets to fit around the previous period. Then You keep expanding that way until you fill out the board. Then you come up with the idea that maybe there's a lot of individual black (neutron) magnets around, and if one of them gets oh the board it unbalances the distribution, which can best be corrected by adding a balancing black magnet, but starts leaving gaps between black magnets, etc etc. Anyway, you create this game, and you get some of your cohorts, and maybe a science person or two to start a rumor that there might be some scientific information connected to this game and that Wikipedia might even consider doing an an article on it. Is that possible? WFPMWFPM (talk) 03:10, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Sounds like WFF 'N PROOF. That has an article because it's a commercial success, but it's actually a thinly veiled repackaging of a symbolic logic class. Hex (board game) is probably better known as a mathematical plaything than as a commercial board game, and it has an article. If it's possible to deliberately set out to get enough publicity to get onto Wikipedia that way, it would have to be a career, not a hobby, and I haven't heard of anyone doing it (certainly not an introvert like me; for one thing I don't have "cohorts", and for another I have given up on writing new articles – even my additions to ex-dividend date have been removed by people who don't seem to understand some details I do.) Removing original research is a routine pain that goes with Wikipedia, along with removing vandalism, advertising and creationism, although no supplier of original research considers his historic breakthrough to be routine. Anyway, I'm not the guy you need to convince, because I usually let others decide if something has enough references. Art LaPella (talk) 07:26, 17 October 2008 (UTC) ==Well hello fellow introvert, except that I'm married with 4 progeny which kind of shook me out of that. I guess I've just run into someone who really isn't interested in science, as is the majority. But I dont see how you could want to become a genious in mathematics without being interested in something you could do with that knowledge. My mother told me that if I became an Injuneer I could probably always find a job and there were hard times in those days. But I guess I'm a just a frustrated scientist who doesn't know how to make a living at that. But I'm not trying to get personal publicity. I'm trying to get a system of logical discussion of scientific ideas based on (technical merit?) or something like that but not peer pressure. I think that maybe Philosophy is the study of ideas (abstractions) and Science is the study about ideas about real physical entities. And when I see or hear some "Scientist?) talking about something that isn't real I have my doubts about his MO. Like a discussion about whether something can be a "point source" of something real. But If John Dalton got away with it maybe I can to. WFPMWFPM (talk) 13:31, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Places like http://www.bautforum.com/ . Art LaPella (talk) 13:56, 17 October 2008 (UTC)PS: I also have an economics minded son (MBA) who is not interested in science and he's a nuce guy too.WFPMWFPM (talk) 14:21, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

==When I was a child and my mother used to take jme along on red cross drives, she used to quote a poem question to people as maaybe a way to make conversation. Anyhow the poem was " If a third of six were three, what would a fourth of twenty be? And I still don't know the answer to that question. Is there an answer? WFPMWFPM (talk) 02:14, 18 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Not according to this. But I've seen such questions mixed with more serious math puzzles, something like if 3x3=10, then what is 6x9? 6x9=2 threesx3 threes=(2x3) threexthrees=(2x3)x10=60. Art LaPella (talk) 04:29, 18 October 2008 (UTC)
 * =I remember being impressed by the "profundity" of the question at the time. And since then I've got a college education and occasionally thought about it and I'm suprised to note that my level of intelligence has risen to where I can say with confidence "It's not 7+1/2. But Maybe I should have studied more algebra. Anyhow you can maybe appreciate my skepticism about mathematics as a problem solving mechanism. I was once the liasson person that a Phd professor from Oklahoma State worked with in teaching employees about product reliability problems and you can imagine his distress when he found out that he had to start out by teaching me the theory about the ordered number set at al. But look. First we have a big set called "ideas". Then we have a subset called "ideas about real physical entities". Cant it be made known that the rules of constructive discussion about ideas about things are more rationalistic, and thus restrictive, than the rules about ideas in general and should be treated that way. Weve got Chronology, and Casuality, And supposedly a hierarchial set of entities to deal with in the real world, as opposed to the Mathematical world, Which is ideaologically infinitely large at both ends. WFPMWFPM (talk) 09:39, 18 October 2008 (UTC) And I dont see how we can determine the mathematical relationship of 2 to 3 in your problem, given the required rationality of size relationships of numbers as distances on the number line. WFPMWFPM (talk) 10:06, 18 October 2008 (UTC) But if you can establish the relative size relationships of the numbers 1,2, and 3, then I know how to use the Pythagorean theorem to prove that the 10 is greater than 3 times 3. WFPMWFPM (talk) 16:51, 18 October 2008 (UTC) Meanwhile in the real investment world I wish I had the brains and the guts to make up my mind and do something right with relation to an etf fund called BWC. But I'm not trying to bother you with that. WFPMWFPM (talk) 17:21, 18 October 2008 (UTC) But I dont think the consensus theory is the best criteria of judgement in that case, because I think that a minority will figure it out and gain while the rest of us will flounder around and come out even or lose.WFPMWFPM (talk) 18:26, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Sounds something like Mathematical model.

The price of a security is a measure of the current consensus. So you can't rely on that same consensus to determine if that price is going up or down, as such an expectation is already included in the current price. People who claim to tell you what's going up and what's going down are usually lying – if such knowledge were so easily available, billionaires would have hired someone to have already acted on that information, and taken the profit out of it because they would keep buying or selling until that drives the price up or down to its predicted level. I think BWC is more likely to go up than down in the next few weeks, simply because its discount from its net asset value is bigger (that is, more negative) than normal. But as a long term investment I have no idea because I'm a trader, not an investment advisor, and I don't trust investment advisors anyway except to tell you the basics like Suze Orman – buy and hold, diversify and don't feed the stock brokers and pump and dumpers. Art LaPella (talk) 18:58, 19 October 2008 (UTC)
 * = Well we agree on investment. philosophy, which is more irrational than science; because it involves more human factors. I've been espousing on Talk:Universe today. Tell me what you think about that. And you might undo my bold typing, because I didn,t intend it. WFPMWFPM (talk) 20:45, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

I undid it (you used semicolons instead of colons). Your most relevant comment there was "I like it because it promotes the idea of the existence of a hierarchy of things", and the least relevant one was changing the Relevance? section, which is a joke, into a speech. Art LaPella (talk) 22:23, 19 October 2008 (UTC)
 * ==I was commenting on the size of the universe as given in the Universe article, 93 billion light years, (at least). WFPMWFPM (talk) 23:12, 19 October 2008 (UTC) But that's only 3x3x3 =27 times what I had thought maybe, so what does it matter. It's only science. WFPMWFPM (talk) 23:26, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

As long as we can't really go there, it's only science. Art LaPella (talk) 23:48, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Art LaPella for president!
Great page - the amusing parts are true, the true parts are amusing, and none of it's boring. -- Philcha (talk) 23:57, 29 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Thank you! Art LaPella (talk) 01:09, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

Fringe theories
Re "The most dangerous pseudoscience is promoted by academia, especially in the so-called "social sciences"", you might like to consider the Sokal affair. --Philcha (talk) 23:14, 27 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Thank you, I used it. Art LaPella (talk) 01:39, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Still holds true
The fact I only just came across this and that it still holds true in 2024 shows that this is a brilliant piece of work! Well done. Nford24 (PE121 Personnel Request Form) 06:29, 8 February 2024 (UTC)