Review of 2023 book: How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology Philip Ball. ISBN9781529095999

  • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Math controls nothing and only models them. It is CRITICALLY important to remember that mathematical models are ONLY models, no matter how closely they match any sampled data.

    • Meowoem@sh.itjust.works
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      10 months ago

      Everything is math, it’s what controls gravity and cell division and protein folding - there is no god it’s all just math

      Of course the model is only a model but the point is you can use the model to predict real world responses, therefore you can test millions of things and do the one which is most likely to work

      • jaycifer@kbin.social
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        10 months ago

        I think the difference here is between your conception that reality follows a mathematical model while their conception is that mathematical models follow and try to be reflective of reality.

        I think their concern is that, if one believes reality follows math, when the model fails to accurately predict something, the person with the model may wonder what’s wrong with reality. If that person believed the model follows reality they would wonder what’s wrong with the model. The latter perspective will yield better results.

        It’s the difference between saying “this is how it works” vs “to the best of my knowledge this is how it works.”

        • Meowoem@sh.itjust.works
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          10 months ago

          That’s ridiculous, if I think that one apple plus one apple is going to result in three apples then I try it and find it’s actually two I’m not going to blame the universe I’m going to know my understanding of arithmetic is flawed.

          It’s not the math of the human made model that controls the universe that would be silly. The model is the current best approximation of the actual math that defines the universe.

          An accurate model allows you to predict the outcome of events, like we can predict how many apples will be in the bag. With some things it gets very complicated because there’s lots of things and various possible states but we can model that with statistics and calculous and stuff. We can even make a set of all possibile results and use that as a map to tell us if something is possible, how likely it is and what we can do to make it more or less likely - nothing the guy said was controversial, we can map cellar interactions even if that requires using complex multidimensional math (mathematics have had to get used to doing this sort of math a lot recently so I’m sure they’ll manage)

      • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        No, you’ve internalized it in the wrong way. The mathematical model comes AFTER the real world. It is not related to the real world what so ever except in correlation. Correlation is not causation. ESPECIALLY with a human-made MODEL.

        If the maths actually drove ANYTHING, you wouldn’t be saying, “most likely” to work…

        • Meowoem@sh.itjust.works
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          10 months ago

          Yes that’s a model, I’m not saying the model magically controls reality but that the underpinning reality is math - the reason you always have two apples in a bag when you start with one and add another is because of math, the human model of that isn’t controlling it but if we want two apples in a bag and we currently only have one then we can use our model to determine how many apples we need to add into the bag.

          The same is true of more complex systems, if we can accurately model the cellar interactions then we can derive solutions in the same way

          • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            That’s the thing: It’s NOT math. Math is an expression of relationships. The underpinning of reality IS NOT math. Ever. Math is a simplification. Always.

            • Meowoem@sh.itjust.works
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              10 months ago

              You’re using odd ways of describing things to try and win a pointless argument, even if everything you say is correct then it changes literally nothing about anything so whatever yeah use words like a weirdo if you like

              • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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                10 months ago

                No, it IS important. Notice how you keep saying, “the math does it”.

                You would make a terrible experimental physicist because you’d just sit there adjusting your aparatus because it doesn’t match the equations instead of actually learning something new… It is not the math doing anything. The math does nothing. The aparatus doesn’t fucking care what you think it’s supposed to do. It doesn’t care what’s written on the paper.

                There is no underlying calculation to expose. What you are doing is pidgeonholing your thought process. You are narrowing the avenues in which you think, which absolutely can and does make people miss important crossroads all the time.

                It may be an abstract concept I’m referencing when it comes to math, but the problem is real in human thinking. It shows up in programming all the time. People insist things MUST work a certain way… and are proven wrong again and again… and that’s in a domain where humans DO have control over what happens and it actually is an equation!

                How much worse do you think dogmatic thinking gets when it’s far more abstract? How long did it take people to accept the concept of ‘i’? Hell, how long did it take people to accept zero?! Humans are always. Always. Dumber than they think they are. That includes me. That’s how I’ve learned these lessons over the years: by putting my foot in my mouth and not liking the taste.