h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

HS.



The central problems used in this area of research are abstract reasoning tasks. The basic task has no familiar content or context, so there is little chance of this source of error. Where realistic content is used, subjects would take cues from it. As long as the material is congruent with logic and reality, this will result in higher scores.

To take this to it's absurdest extent, where there was a logical problem involving combinations of food and a dressing even young children would get the answer 'right' if it was "Icecream and chocolate sauce" or "Hamburger and mustard". Icecream and mustard etc were hardly ever chosen. Of course, these congruences are common in real life and I'm not surprised that people can fall into error when unusual exceptions crop up.

That is a failure to do the experiment in *inductive* problem situations, and people notoriously fail to carry out what is the correct strategey of trying to falsify the assumed rule. I have done work in this area, but the problems I mentioned earlier were such that *deductive* reasoning would be required.

toxx

Noggin. I think GIGO is a bit harsh, since we haven't read the paper in full. To assume that the prior probability of the existence of God is 0.5 is unjustified, however. Swinburne used a similar method among others. He would leave the reader to deduce conclusions after making his case. As you know, he taught me this stuff! He also wrote on the philosophy of science, mind and the metaphysics of space and time. In short, he was something of a polymath and took a creditably balanced view.

Presumably, the authors of this paper, being scientists, wouldn't have heard of Swinburne. If they had, they might have saved themselves some work, I suspect.

toxx

What is GIGO anyhow? I actually didn't expect the article to be taken seriously, especially with the end bit about taking bets on the second coming. . .

az

az. Garbage In, Garbage Out.

The article is rather trivialising, but the paper itself might be interesting.

toxx

Matholwch, I see what you mean about penicillin, though I have to think about whether I agree...
Re MRSA and other superbugs, they are rife in NZ hospitals. I can see why resistance is building everywhere. We had a doctor who wasn't happy unless he had offered us antibiotics (which in 90% of cases, I refused.) Our present doctor has a sign in the waiting room pointing out that anitbiotics don't work for heaps of things, and warning patients not to ask for them unnecessarily...

A 67% chance? This is fascinating...

Hi Della,

The rise of MRSA has been linked to all sorts of potential causes other than just the over-use and abuse of antibiotics.

One interesting potential cause is the loss of authoritarian Ward Sisters. Before the widespread introduction of antibiotics and antibacterials hospitals had to rely on iron discipline when it came to cleanliness. This was generally enforced by experienced Ward Sister who were given complete power over the running of their wards. Doctors were only allowed on-site on her sufferance and woe betide any lax houseman who didn't follow her hygiene rules.

Now our hospitals are run by 'managers' and 'ward teams' and the like. Very touchy feely but not always as effective in the area of hygiene. As more recent government inspections have found the whole discipline thing has gone west and with it effective hygiene.

I say bring back the ferocious ward sister and the carbolic soap!

Blessings,
Matholwch /|\.

Jez, Math, have you seen 'Ed Prynn's Amazing Garden of Standing Stones' @ http://edwardprynn.tripod.com/


Alji

Hi Alji

Thanks for the link - absolutely amazing!

Blessings,
Matholwch /|\.

Greetings from Strontium Dog poking his head in on a brief sojurn from a conference (Not interesting, dont ask me about it, only need to g for wrk reasons.) Just a few brief comments on some of the things posted since the last time I was here.

LOGIC

This was a very interesting theme, I did wonder if the conversation would finaly alight on the logicaly arrived at premise of 'Cogito ergo et sum' or 'I think therefore I am.' To my mind this is the fundamental flaw and advantage of logic, in the end the only thing I can prove is that I exist, and I can only prove that to myself, everything else is a logical deduction or induction based on the information I recieve from my senses. I can only prove this because I am aware of my own awareness, my consciousness (I liked the waveform metaphore but I am nt sure whether I agree or not)

Clearly if I was to live my life from this reasoning I would probably be mad and no doubt feel it and be treated as such by others.

This seems to me to link to another theme in the last 70 or so posts, that of trust: trust implies doubt and uncertanty, but also implies faith, not necissarily in god (Although it might if you were so inclined). In the first instance this is faith in the information we get from our senses, or put another way our experiences. It seems to me that if our experiences have been of others being untrustworthy then we have a number of possibilities:

1)People are untrustworthy.

2)The people I have met so far are untrustworthy., but there may be trustworthy people I have not met.

3)I have been trusting people unwisely

4)I have not had the right experiences to learn how to judge the trustworthyness of others.

5)I may not understand what trustworthyness is.

6)I may not be trustworthy myself.

7)I may need to be a teacher of trustworthyness to the untrustworthy

ect, ect .... The list may well be endless.

This highlights the big disadvantage of a pure logic approach, Human beings are too complex, and their experiences too sensitive to 'initial conditions' to apply the hard and fast rules, there comes a point where I at least need to trust my feelings and intuition about situations because attempting to understand the huge nuumber of variables constants ect becomes a task so imense my brain cannot cope.

The advantage of logic is of course when the complexity is managable then some kind of answer can be arrived at.

This for me leads to the importance of accepting that whilst I try to make the 'narratives' I tell and my contributions to the discourses I am a part of as logical, consistant and objective as possible, they in the end rest on my subjective experiences and how I have understood them.

At one point in the preceeding posts I wondered if someone would highlight that the 'narratives' we tell are told not just with words, pictures, sounds ect but with signs, what Sasseur and later Barthes called signifiers which represent the idea we have in our minds (The signified) which in turn is our personal representation of the object, action ect in the real world (The referant). This was at one point implied in the preceeding posts and was responded to by someone (Sorry I can't remember who right now) as a bleak point of view.

If the certanty that there is a knowable concrete reality is abandoned, for a time life might seem a bleak and lonley place, however if the individual is able to allow themselves to grieve for that concrete reality, the more organic reality of narrative and discourse between the people we talk to on a day to day basis, is a wonderful, exiting and extraordinarily diverse one. I would emphasise that whilst this seems abstract, it is not more abstract than the view that there is one absolute truth, just more honest.

There were a lot of interesting posts I wanted to respond to but at the moment my time is limited, Its all fascinating stuff.

Alji

Must admit, quarried stone is not my favourite thing at the moment...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A2400085

Jez - heathen and witch and anti-quarrying campaigner.

"The central problems used in this area of research are abstract reasoning tasks. The basic task has no familiar content or context, so there is little chance of this source of error. Where realistic content is used, subjects would take cues from it. As long as the material is congruent with logic and reality, this will result in higher scores. "

I'm familiar with these and enjoy them. Last year I took the civil service graduate entrance test, probably failing the maths and passing overall on the basis of my abstract reasoning result. Their test is wonderful because the problems increase in difficulty exponentially, with the final series depending entirely on contingent clues i.e. one or more out of,say, three clues requires one to work out the result of other, unmentioned, causes to achieve a resolution of the problem. There is usually a 10% pass rate on the test.

But no, I failed the interviews (over two days) and wear that badge with pride. They are currently looking for people who think completely 'outside the box' i.e. blue sky with no touch with pragmatics. I've worked with that sort of person and spent over a year in a messy project which was growing in complexity and unresolved issues as a direct result of inpracticality. And then the government (which sets the parameters) blames the confusion on the civil servants.

it's like the problem of public sector pay: we don't get a decent pay rise when the rest of industry gets increases above inflation 'pur encourager les autres'. We don't get a decent pay rise when times are bad because that would create a media riot. Then successive governments try to work out why the best people avoid taking public sector jobs. What do these leaders have for brains?

Jez. Isn't there a bit of a tension considering that Stonehenge etc are made of quarried stone? I suppose there is the odd glacial erratic about, but you presumably have a cutoff date when quarrying ought to have stopped. I wonder what it might be and how you justify it.

toxx

<>
Indeed! When I worked in a rest home, when I was 22, I nursed a woman who was 90+, and who'd lost a leg in the blitz. She was a ferocious old woman, who said I would *never* have got a job in any hospital she ran! (Rightly so, I did the classic thing, taking all the old ladies' teeth to clean, and getting them mixed up when it came time to give them all back. No, truly, I did!)

In December, I read an amazing Young Adult novel about this very stone circle, and a woman and her husband-to-be, all involving an ancient transgression.. I wish I could remember the author, for once it *wasn't* a Catherine Fisher! (Have you read her, Jim loves her books. She's a Welsh woman and her writing is amazing!)

hehehe....Della... that's so awful about the teeth, I can't say I'd be impressed if it were my teeth tho...

I'd read about people doing that - then I went an did it! When I was 17, I was a waitress for a while, and I really *did* put my thumb in a bowl of soup.
My brother (I don't think he'd mind me saying this, least I hope he wouldn't) made an hilarious mistake in one of his first jobs. He worked in a hardware shop, and a customer came in with a broken pane of glass. He said "I'd like another one just like it." So my brother spent hours carefully measuring and sketching each broken piece, in order to order one broken in exactly the same way, for the customer! (His boss intercepted the order and put it on the staffroom wall as a reminder. It was there for months, to his embarassment! )

toxx

As far as I know, no British Neolithic or Bronze Age megalithic monument was made of quarried stone, and, indeed, only Stonehenge, which is late and atypical, is even of worked stone.

Most are made of local stuff picked off the ground and dragged around.

The sarsen deposits around Avebury are vast and the stones for the greatest monument in Britain came from there.

There is precious little evidence of any damaging quarrying until the last few centuries, and most of that is within the last fifty years.

And even you have to admit that 3.2 million tons of rock from the very rim of the Peak District National Park's archeaological treasures is unacceptable.

Jez - heathen and witch

Jez. We live and learn! I'd assumed that Stonehenge was the paradigm and understood that the stones came from some distance away. Forget whether I'd heard Portland or Wales - you see how vague I am. So the majority of stones used in these constructions are glacial erratics or surface exposures eh.

I hadn't thought much about the quarrying in the Peak. You couldn't miss the white deposits all round Cauldon and I believe it is an important source of local employment. Old hiking club used to include at least one guy who worked there. I suspect that it's just outside the park though. Other quarries are at least unobtrusive from the roads. In fact, the remains of old mining enhance some of the caves. Any links to the gist of the discussion?

toxx

toxx

At Stonehenge, only the ring of bluestones is not local. They are by far the smallest of the stones in the structure, only about the height of a person, and may well have come from Wales although there are competing theories.

All the edge stones, all the lintels, and the huge trilithon stones are local, from the deposits on the surface of the Plain.

The biggest monument in the UKL is Avebury, where the stones - unworked - are up to 120 tons in weight and there is an entire village within the main circle, and two double circles with coves within them. These stones are all from surface deposits within ten miles, probabaly three miles of the final site.

The hundreds of small stone circles in the Peak are all of local surface stone. The hundreds of circles in Wales and Cumbria are also of local surface stone.

It seems our ancestors did not - for whatever reason - dig deep into their landscape. In the Peak, the amount of surface stone is so great that the entire network of drystone walls was originally created from surface stone clearance undertaken to improve the land. Vast amounts of stone was shifted by the Bronze Age farmers to make their fields, and other stones carefully laid into cairns for their dead. On one ridge, Gardom's Edge, it is possible to see a walled enclosure more than a mile long around what is probably/possibly an excarnation platform. And while the field clearance cairns are of broken stone, the ones which are more interesting are always carefully made of unbroken, rounded stone origianlly deposited in the ice age and left undamaged when it was moved to make either burial or boundary (or ritual??? ) cairns.

The stones even of Arbor Low, the biggest of the stone circles in the Peak, are unworked and local.

Ony since recent times has quarrying become 'necessary' to humans in the Peak.

Links - no, I don't have links. I am a google person, and tend to just look things up when I need to. But I am the daughter of a passionate geologist and the stone stuff is close to my heart.

Jez - off work with no voice