5 thoughts on “Nudge! For reals.

  1. So you’re saying we should send Sunstein on a rocketship 4 light years away to move around nitrogen molecules until we all select the best health insurance?

  2. This example reminded me of problem 2 of the SIAM 100-digit challenge.

    2. A photon moving at speed 1 in the x-y plane starts at t = 0 at (x,y) = (0.5, 0.1) heading due east. Around every integer lattice point (i, j) in the plane, a circular mirror of radius 1/3 has been erected. How far from the origin is the photon at t = 10?

    The numerical problem in calculating this answer arises because small errors in the calculated angle of reflection are quickly amplified on subsequent reflections. Nevertheless, many people solved it correctly.

    See https://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/trefethen/hundred.html.

    Bob76

  3. A really interesting read.

    It seems related to something CS Peirce argued. Not his quip that “all clocks are clouds” but rather arguments that inference could only be logical for collectives. Single occurrences do not matter logically. Similar to single molecules.

    One of the ways I try to get this across is “Making sense of inherently noisy experimental data can be formalized in assessments of what would repeatedly happen in some reality or possible world. What did happen is just the remnants of the dead past whereas in science we want to grasp what will likely happen in the future. Not what happen but what _would_ repeatedly happen.

    Unfortunately, we often are not in setting where there is a collection of physical molecules that can serves as the possible world.

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