Re:The World Is Built on Probability (1988)
by roenxi on Thursday October 18, 2018 @11:08PM
(#18253995)
Yeah, but there is an important subtlety. Quantum mechanics has a bunch of things that can be /modeled extremely well/ by random variables. But it might still turn out that that they are deterministic in some complicated way.
Then we would be back in a universe where we have an extremely useful concept in the humble random variable, and no examples of anything that is fundamentally random. If I start with a random variable, I couldn't reasonably approximate it with a real phenomenon, because the phenomenon would be deterministic.
Compare that to a line - I can define a line between the center of mass of my two hands. We can quibble all day about whether that is a well defined definition (I suppose it isn't), but if I wanted to approximate a real line with two points in space I could.
I contend this is an interesting an important difference between subjects like geometry and subjects like statistics. The underpinnings of statistic are _extremely_ philosophical.
Then we would be back in a universe where we have an extremely useful concept in the humble random variable, and no examples of anything that is fundamentally random. If I start with a random variable, I couldn't reasonably approximate it with a real phenomenon, because the phenomenon would be deterministic.
Compare that to a line - I can define a line between the center of mass of my two hands. We can quibble all day about whether that is a well defined definition (I suppose it isn't), but if I wanted to approximate a real line with two points in space I could.
I contend this is an interesting an important difference between subjects like geometry and subjects like statistics. The underpinnings of statistic are _extremely_ philosophical.