Moderation Questions

Falsifiability doesn't mean you can make a random process produce a desired outcome within a specified number of trials. It means you can hypothetically disprove a theory. We have proved the laws of probability. We can therefore use those laws to prove or disprove statements about random processes whose probability is known. What those probabilities are, even if they are vanishingly close to zero, doesn't matter as far as falsifiability is concerned. For example, the proposition "it's possible to get dealt 5 of a kind from a standard 52 card deck" can be falsified by showing that the probability of this happening is zero. You don't need to deal the cards for eternity waiting to be dealt 5 aces.

Put another way - how many hands in a row? I'm sure we can agree that we can deal out cards until I get dealt pocket aces once. If we deal out long enough, we'll hit a streak where I get dealt pocket aces twice in a row. I'm sure you can see where this is going.

To be honest though, statements about probability, even when applied to real world scenarios, probably belong in the realm of mathematics, where falsifiability is not at issue.

I do agree that it’s logically possible to be dealt aces an infinite times in a row, because it doesn’t entail a contradiction. It would just be unfalsifiable because there is no scenario you can set up that would allow you to show it was possible, due to some metaphysical constraints like the impossibility of ever actually observing an infinite series, since you can always tack on more attempts to not be dealt aces.

So it would fail to meet your criteria of falsifiability, since you could not even come up with a hypothetical scenario where it is possible to have someone actually dealt aces infinite times in a row.

It’s the same case as trying to show that any human could be immortal, since you can always tack on another day of immortality and thus another opportunity to show that the theory is false.

Translation: "I refuse to accept that this random guy who insults the psychos and Nazi pigs on this forum knows more than I do!!!!!!!"

Therapy maybe? Or become an alco boy like d2? The possibilities are endless.

You seem like a drunk loser, maybe you shouldn't drink at all.

I think you are confusing different issues here.

One is related to infinities and the fact that mathematics deals in infinities whereas reality does not. This is true. Mathematical theorems also do not fall into categories of falsifiable or not, they can either be proved from the axioms or they can't - otherwise you could make facile statements like "how do we know that all right angle triangles adhere to Pythagoras' Theorem? Maybe we just haven't yet found one that doesn't. Pythagoras Theorem is unfalsifiable."

The second is that it's impracticable to deal out cards until you get aces an arbitrarily large number of finite hands in a row. This is also true. By your logic the proposition "it is possible to be dealt aces once" would also be unfalsifiable, since it is possible to deal out an arbitrary finite number of hands and *not* deal pocket aces during any experiment you care to construct, even though the probability of this happening is vanishingly small. However, you can see this logic break down once you start working with very large numbers. For example, if you dealt out 4 hands in a row to every person on earth, statistically one of them would get aces every time. Add 65 more earths and it's 5. 14,500 more earths and it's 6. You can see where this is going.

Neither of these points make the proposition "it is possible to be dealt aces an arbitrary finite number of times in a row" unfalsifiable, for the reasons above and those I gave in my previous post.

Karl? Is that you Karl? I would ask how the anger management therapy is going, but it looks like the results speak for themselves!

I should quantify what I mean by "statistically" above. The probability of a 1 in N event happening in N trials converges to 1-1/e or about 63% as N gets arbitrarily large. For a 1 in N event happening in T trials you can get arbitrarily close to 100% probability by increasing T. In the limit where T is infinity, any event with a non zero probability will happen an infinite number of times with probability 100%.

But again, this is all pure maths and falsifiability doesn't enter the picture here.

Maybe you should start

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delirium_t...

Poor alcoboy, you could have become so much more...

DTs are no joke, just ask your mother. Sucks for you she couldn't cut down while she was pregnant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychologi...

Ticking every box, alcoboy. Get some help.

This is my last response to you, good luck!

I don't know which previously banned poster this guy is, but I would be shocked if he is Karl.

He seems like a bit of a twat, so naturally I assumed Karl.

Oh, and the anger management issues, obviously.

Karl would make relatively lengthy, mostly substantive posts about Marxism and leftism and then every week or so he would lose his mind and start in with over the top insults, telling people to kill themselves, etc.

Bob is . . . More concise.

Bob is also a super liberal who ofc loves Ukrainian neo-Nazis and Israeli Supremacists. Karl hated both of those groups like a normal person should.

I think you're stating this backwards. The Pythagorean Theorem is falsifiable, all it would take is one example that we could verify with a simple computation and it has been falsified. The strange belief that there is some a, b, and c out there that violates the Pythagorean Theorem despite the proof and all the examples of it holding is unfalsifiable. This actually matters in logic because "self hating" logical systems ie systems that assert their own inconsistency (PA + Axiom that PA is inconsistent) is itself consistent. This is logically equivalent to PA + An exception to the Pythagorean Theorem exists. This works because there is no limit on how large the Godel numbering of the proof of the exception can be, so you can never show that axiom is false. You can show it can't be under 10^10, 10^10^10 etc but that's it.

Ok, thanks. PT clearly wasn't a good example here, of course, it should have occurred to me that it can be falsified by counterexample. How do you falsify a statement like "it's possible to be dealt aces N times in a row" where N is some arbitrarily large finite number though? Or just for ease, "it's possible to flip N heads in a row" or whatever. That doesn't seem as clear cut.

No way SlobBob is Karl imho.

Could be a guy who used to stalk me in RGT some years ago.

I didn't mean that in a strict logical sense. More like if something that nomologically absurd really happened, like someone hitting the lotto every week, we wouldn’t jump to “oh, we must be in a multiverse.” We’d question the mechanism, the models, the randomness, hidden variables, etc.

I think Sloppybob is a horrible poster, but I never saw evidence he loves 'Ukrainian neo-Nazis or Israeli Supremacists. '

As an aside, you're the only poster in this forum who ever got me to defend BobtheSlob.

Why does it need to be falsifiable when we can use maths to calculate the probability? Falsification (where possible) is used to test scientific theories that can't be proved with maths, not for things like this.

The claim, "The decimal determination of pi contains five consecutive 7's" is confirmable but not falsifiable.

I mean, if you read my posts from the last day or so, that was kind of my point.

That's right, because (as yet) there's no mathematical proof, so it remains a scientific theory.