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Has the rabbi already read this article?

שו”תCategory: generalHas the rabbi already read this article?
asked 7 years ago

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מיכי Staff answered 7 years ago

not.

y replied 7 years ago

There's nothing like a good ad hominem, from Prof. Ron Aharoni, in response to the idea being proposed to him (quote I posted below):

“Shalom Yair

Indeed, I think you're right. There's nothing special about a sequence of 6s, other than the fact that it's different for humans.

The relevant concept is “entropy”, a degree of order. Entropy expresses a degree of rarity – the rarer an event, the smaller its entropy.

But what is “rare”? According to the size of the person. Think about the effort invested in arranging the dictionary in alphabetical order. You invest a lot of energy, and get something that externally resembles a jumble of unordered letters. Where did the energy that was invested go? The entropy is not small, so to speak. But in fact, it is small, if you look at it in the right system: not the dictionary alone, but the dictionary combined with the brains of humans. An organized dictionary + brain is more organized than a night of letters + brain. ”

I announced:

This is a very fundamental issue, the logic of which I have not seen anyone take the time to understand until I thought about it myself.
I wanted to ask your opinion on the rationale behind drawing conclusions about the intervention of an intelligent person following a rare and special event that occurred.
If someone rolls a die in front of us and gets 6 a thousand times (and the die itself was found to be fair in the laboratory for sure, the mass is evenly distributed in it, etc.), of course we will all draw conclusions, for example: the die roll is cheating and rolls it so that this special result comes out.
The question is what is different about a sequence of 6 (and its like) compared to any random sequence, since the chance of randomly obtaining any random sequence is exactly equal to the chance of obtaining a “special” sequence. So why don't we conclude something similar about the sequence 21346213 (for example). How does the fact that any sequence meets the criterion of “specialness” (what is that anyway?) change the conclusion that someone caused this result?
I thought about this a lot, and I came to the unequivocal conclusion that the explanation is the following:
Although every sequence (special and not) has an equal chance of being obtained randomly, in the case of a special sequence, the alternative hypothesis (that someone intervened) is more likely than this hypothesis in the case of a random sequence.
And the explanation for this is: special sequences have a higher potential for selection by humans than a specific random sequence, because of their beauty and uniqueness in the eyes of humans.
Demonstration that special sequences have high selection potential:
If we present a class of students with one hundred sequences of which only one is special (66666), and ask each to choose a sequence, the selection will be more or less evenly distributed among the sequences (1 will choose each sequence), except for the special sequence, which will be chosen more than any other sequence (for example, 8 students will choose 666666).

y replied 7 years ago

Oz, if you're interested, we're discussing the topics in the article here:
https://mikyab.net/dwqa-answer/%d7%aa%d7%a9%d7%95%d7%91%d7%94-%d7%9c%d7%aa%d7%99%d7%a7%d7%95%d7%9f-%d7%a9%d7%92%d7%99%d7%90%d7%94-%d7%9e%d7%91%d7%99%d7%9b%d7%94-%d7%91%d7%9e%d7%97%d7%91%d7%a8%d7%aa-%d7%94%d7%a9%d7%9c%d7%99%d7%a9/#comment-14068

y replied 7 years ago

If the Rabbi has already ruled that this is not an ad hominem, I will add the second part of our correspondence:

y:
Next, I thought of a case in which we come to a computer program that randomly rolls a die, according to the movement of the finger on the touch screen, and the result is 6 a thousand times. Let's assume and we have certainty that no person intended to sabotage the program so that it actually results in 6, we will still all conclude that it is probably a bug. Now the question arises again why we would not also conclude in the case of a random sequence, which is determined regardless of the movement of the finger, that there is a bug in the program? After all, the chances of all sequences are equal.
And here it should be said that if we trust our intuition, the only reason to justify such a conclusion is that there is a higher chance of a bug that causes the program to give 6 a thousand times, than a bug that results in some random sequence that is determined regardless of the movement of the finger on the screen. Gadi Alexandrovich also told me that there is a higher chance of such malfunctions.
What do you think about this?

Ron Aharoni:
Nice idea, I agree.

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