Statistical Mechanics Quotes

Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.

What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience. It is radically estranged from the structure of being. The more one sees this, the more senseless it is to continue with generalized descriptions of supposedly specifically schizoid, schizophrenic, hysterical ‘mechanisms.’ There are forms of alienation that are relatively strange to statistically ‘normal’ forms of alienation. The ‘normally’ alienated person, by reason of the fact that he acts more or less like everyone else, is taken to be sane. Other forms of alienation that are out of step with the prevailing state of alienation are those that are labeled by the ‘formal’ majority as bad or mad.

It appears that there are two different ‘mechanisms’ by which orderly events can be produced: the ‘statistical mechanism’ which produces ‘order from disorder’ and the new one, producing ‘order from order’.

Willard Gibbs did for statistical mechanics and for thermodynamics what Laplace did for celestial mechanics and Maxwell did for electrodynamics, namely, made his field a well-nigh finished theoretical structure.

Despite the earnest belief of most of his fans, Einstein did not win his Nobel Prize for the theory of relativity, special or general. He won for explaining a strange effect in quantum mechanics, the photoelectric effect. His solution provided the first real evidence that quantum mechanics wasn’t a crude stopgap for justifying anomalous experiments, but actually corresponds to reality. And the fact that Einstein came up with it is ironic for two reasons. One, as he got older and crustier, Einstein came to distrust quantum mechanics. Its statistical and deeply probabilistic nature sounded too much like gambling to him, and it prompted him to object that “God does not play dice with the universe.” He was wrong, and it’s too bad that most people have never heard the rejoinder by Niels Bohr: “Einstein! Stop telling God what to do.

Qu'une goutee de vin tombe dans un verre d'eau; quelle que soit la loi du movement interne du liquide, nous verrons bientôt se colorer d'une teinte rose uniforme et à partir de ce moment on aura beau agiter le vase, le vin et l'eau ne partaîtront plus pouvoir se séparer. Tout cela, Maxwell et Boltzmann l'ont expliqué, mais celui qui l'a vu plus nettement, dans un livre trop peu lu parce qu'il est difficile à lire, c'est Gibbs dans ses principes de la Mécanique Statistique. Let a drop of wine fall into a glass of water; whatever be the law that governs the internal movement of the liquid, we will soon see it tint itself uniformly pink and from that moment on, however we may agitate the vessel, it appears that the wine and water can separate no more. All this, Maxwell and Boltzmann have explained, but the one who saw it in the cleanest way, in a book that is too little read because it is difficult to read, is Gibbs, in his Principles of Statistical Mechanics.

IT WAS EASIER FOR PEOPLE to be good at something when more of us lived in small, rural communities. Someone could be homecoming queen. Someone else could be spelling-bee champ, math whiz or basketball star. There were only one or two mechanics and a couple of teachers. In each of their domains, these local heroes had the opportunity to enjoy the serotonin-fuelled confidence of the victor. It may be for that reason that people who were born in small towns are statistically overrepresented among the eminent.68 If

All of this, I believe, indicates that in order to grasp the basic grammar of the world, we need to merge three basic ingredients, not just two: not just general relativity and quantum mechanics, but also the theory of heat, that is, statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, which we can also describe as “information theory.

You no longer watch TV, it is TV that watches you (live),” or again: “You are no longer listening to Don’t Panic, it is Don’t Panic that is listening to you”—a switch from the panoptic mechanism of surveillance (Discipline and Punish [Surveiller et punir]) to a system of deterrence, in which the distinction between the passive and the active is abolished. There is no longer any imperative of submission to the model, or to the gaze “YOU are the model!” “YOU are the majority!” Such is the watershed of a hyperreal sociality, in which the real is confused with the model, as in the statistical operation, or with the medium. …Such is the last stage of the social relation, ours, which is no longer one of persuasion (the classical age of propaganda, of ideology, of publicity, etc.) but one of deterrence: “YOU are information, you are the social, you are the event, you are involved, you have the word, etc.” An about-face through which it becomes impossible to locate one instance of the model, of power, of the gaze, of the medium itself, because you are always already on the other side.

The combination of Bayes and Markov Chain Monte Carlo has been called "arguably the most powerful mechanism ever created for processing data and knowledge." Almost instantaneously MCMC and Gibbs sampling changed statisticians' entire method of attacking problems. In the words of Thomas Kuhn, it was a paradigm shift. MCMC solved real problems, used computer algorithms instead of theorems, and led statisticians and scientists into a worked where "exact" meant "simulated" and repetitive computer operations replaced mathematical equations. It was a quantum leap in statistics.

The cause of the onset of overgeneralization [of regular past tense forms to irregular verbs] is not a change in vocabulary statistics, but some endogenous change in the child's language mechanisms.

It was Joseph Overton, an American lawyer, who first explained the mechanisms of uppercase Politics in the 1990s. He began with a simple question: Why is it that so many good ideas don’t get taken seriously? Overton realized that politicians, provided they want to be reelected, can’t permit themselves viewpoints that are seen as too extreme. In order to hold power, they have to keep their ideas within the margins of what’s acceptable. This window of acceptability is populated by schemes that are rubber-stamped by the experts, tallied up by statistics services, and have good odds of making it into the law books.

In mathematical physics, quantum field theory and statistical mechanics are characterized by the probability distribution of exp(−βH(x)) where H(x) is a Hamiltonian function. It is well known in [12] that physical problems are determined by the algebraic structure of H(x). Statistical learning theory can be understood as mathematical physics where the Hamiltonian is a random process defined by the log likelihood ratio function.

The Loneliness of the Military Historian Confess: it's my profession that alarms you. This is why few people ask me to dinner, though Lord knows I don't go out of my way to be scary. I wear dresses of sensible cut and unalarming shades of beige, I smell of lavender and go to the hairdresser's: no prophetess mane of mine, complete with snakes, will frighten the youngsters. If I roll my eyes and mutter, if I clutch at my heart and scream in horror like a third-rate actress chewing up a mad scene, I do it in private and nobody sees but the bathroom mirror. In general I might agree with you: women should not contemplate war, should not weigh tactics impartially, or evade the word enemy, or view both sides and denounce nothing. Women should march for peace, or hand out white feathers to arouse bravery, spit themselves on bayonets to protect their babies, whose skulls will be split anyway, or,having been raped repeatedly, hang themselves with their own hair. There are the functions that inspire general comfort. That, and the knitting of socks for the troops and a sort of moral cheerleading. Also: mourning the dead. Sons,lovers and so forth. All the killed children. Instead of this, I tell what I hope will pass as truth. A blunt thing, not lovely. The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner, though I am good at what I do. My trade is courage and atrocities. I look at them and do not condemn. I write things down the way they happened, as near as can be remembered. I don't ask why, because it is mostly the same. Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win. In my dreams there is glamour. The Vikings leave their fields each year for a few months of killing and plunder, much as the boys go hunting. In real life they were farmers. The come back loaded with splendour. The Arabs ride against Crusaders with scimitars that could sever silk in the air. A swift cut to the horse's neck and a hunk of armour crashes down like a tower. Fire against metal. A poet might say: romance against banality. When awake, I know better. Despite the propaganda, there are no monsters, or none that could be finally buried. Finish one off, and circumstances and the radio create another. Believe me: whole armies have prayed fervently to God all night and meant it, and been slaughtered anyway. Brutality wins frequently, and large outcomes have turned on the invention of a mechanical device, viz. radar. True, valour sometimes counts for something, as at Thermopylae. Sometimes being right - though ultimate virtue, by agreed tradition, is decided by the winner. Sometimes men throw themselves on grenades and burst like paper bags of guts to save their comrades. I can admire that. But rats and cholera have won many wars. Those, and potatoes, or the absence of them. It's no use pinning all those medals across the chests of the dead. Impressive, but I know too much. Grand exploits merely depress me. In the interests of research I have walked on many battlefields that once were liquid with pulped men's bodies and spangled with exploded shells and splayed bone. All of them have been green again by the time I got there. Each has inspired a few good quotes in its day. Sad marble angels brood like hens over the grassy nests where nothing hatches. (The angels could just as well be described as vulgar or pitiless, depending on camera angle.) The word glory figures a lot on gateways. Of course I pick a flower or two from each, and press it in the hotel Bible for a souvenir. I'm just as human as you. But it's no use asking me for a final statement. As I say, I deal in tactics. Also statistics: for every year of peace there have been four hundred years of war.

Butters," I said, "Don't give me statistics on heart failure. Fear is a part of life. It's a warning mechanism. That's all. It tells you when there's danger around. Its job is to help you survive. Not cripple you into being unable to do it.

Although technology often leads science in discovery, the philosophy of technology is usually drawn from the scientific philosophy of its time. In our time, the technology of machines has drawn its inspiration from mechanics, dealing with complexity by reducing the number of relevant parts. The technology of government, on the other hand, has drawn upon statistical mechanics, creating simplicity by dealing only with people in the structureless mass, as interchangeable units, and taking averages.

Now, we see what we are shown. We have gotten used to being shown no matter what, within or beyond the limited range of human sight. This habituation to the monopoly of visualization-on-command strongly suggests that only those things that can in some way be visualized, recorded, and replayed at will are part of reality...The result is a strange mistrusts of our own eyes, a disposition to take as real only that which is mechanically displayed in a photograph, a statistical curve, or a table. Eyewitness testimony must be "substantiated" by records that have been acquired, and can be stored and then shown.

However insignificant the frictional and heating effects in a clock may be from the practical point of view, there can be no doubt that the second attitude, which does not neglect them, is the more fundamental one, even when we are faced with the regular motion of a clock that is driven by a spring. For it must not be believed that the driving mechanism really does away with the statistical nature of the process. The true physical picture includes the possibility that even a regularly going clock should all at once invert its motion and, working backward, rewind its own spring – at the expense of the heat of the environment.

Einstein came to distrust quantum mechanics. Its statistical and deeply probabilistic nature sounded too much like gambling to him, and it prompted him to object that “God does not play dice with the universe.” He was wrong, and it’s too bad that most people have never heard the rejoinder by Niels Bohr: “Einstein! Stop telling God what to do.

This irrelevance of molecular arrangements for macroscopic results has given rise to the tendency to confine physics and chemistry to the study of homogeneous systems as well as homogeneous classes. In statistical mechanics a great deal of labor is in fact spent on showing that homogeneous systems and homogeneous classes are closely related and to a considerable extent interchangeable concepts of theoretical analysis (Gibbs theory). Naturally, this is not an accident. The methods of physics and chemistry are ideally suited for dealing with homogeneous classes with their interchangeable components. But experience shows that the objects of biology are radically inhomogeneous both as systems (structurally) and as classes (generically). Therefore, the method of biology and, consequently, its results will differ widely from the method and results of physical science.

The history of pi is only a small part of the history of mathematics, which itself is but a mirror of the history of man. That history is full of patterns and tendencies whose frequency and similarity is too striking to be dismissed as accidental. Like the laws of quantum mechanics, and in the final analysis, of all nature, the laws of history are evidently statistical in character. But what those laws are, nobody knows. Only a few scraps are evident. And of these is that the Heisels of Cleveland are more numerous than the Archimedes of Syracuse.

The point that apocalyptic makes is not only that people who wear crowns and who claim to foster justice by the sword are not as strong as they think--true as that is: we still sing, 'O where are Kings and Empires now of old that went and came?' It is that people who bear crosses are working with the grain of the universe. One does not come to that belief by reducing social processes to mechanical and statistical models, nor by winning some of one's battles for the control of one's own corner of the fallen world. One comes to it by sharing the life of those who sing about the Resurrection of the slain Lamb.

This was, he told the King, a femfatalatron, an erotifying device stochastic, elastic and orgiastic, and with plenty of feedback; whoever was placed inside the apparatus instantaneously experienced all the charms, lures, wiles, winks and witchery of all the fairer sex in the Universe at once. The femfatalatron operated on a power of forty megamors, with a maximum attainable efficiency—given a constant concupiscence coefficient—of ninety-six percent, while the system's libidinous lubricity, measured of course in kilocupids, produced up to six units for every remote-control caress. This marvelous mechanism, moreover, was equipped with reversible ardor dampers, omnidirectional consummation amplifiers, absorption philters, paphian peripherals, and "first-sight" flip-flop circuits, since Trurl held here to the position of Dr. Yentzicus, creator of the famous oculo-oscular feel theory. There were also all sorts of auxiliary components, like a high-frequency titillizer, an alternating tantalator, plus an entire set of lecherons and debaucheraries; on the outside, in a special glass case, were enormous dials, on which one could carefully follow the course of the whole decaptivation process. Statistical analysis revealed that the femfatalatron gave positive, permanent results in ninety-eight cases of unrequited amatorial superfixation out of a hundred.

When he applied this approach to a gas of quantum particles, Einstein discovered an amazing property: unlike a gas of classical particles, which will remain a gas unless the particles attract one another, a gas of quantum particles can condense into some kind of liquid even without a force of attraction between them. This phenomenon, now called Bose-Einstein condensation,* was a brilliant and important discovery in quantum mechanics, and Einstein deserves most of the credit for it. Bose had not quite realized that the statistical mathematics he used represented a fundamentally new approach. As with the case of Planck’s constant, Einstein recognized the physical reality, and the significance, of a contrivance that someone else had devised.

Good science is more than the mechanics of research and experimentation. Good science requires that scientists look inward--to contemplate the origin of their thoughts. The failures of science do not begin with flawed evidence or fumbled statistics; they begin with personal self-deception and an unjustified sense of knowing. Once you adopt the position that personal experience is the "proof of the pudding," reasoned discussion simply isn't possible. Good science requires distinguishing between "felt knowledge" and knowledge arising out of testable observations. "I am sure" is a mental sensation, not a testable conclusion. Put hunches, gut feelings, and intuitions into the suggestion box. Let empiric methods shake out the good from the bad suggestions.

Bose’s creative use of statistical analysis was reminiscent of Einstein’s youthful enthusiasm for that approach. He not only got Bose’s paper published, he also extended it with three papers of his own. In them, he applied Bose’s counting method, later called “Bose-Einstein statistics,” to actual gas molecules, thus becoming the primary inventor of quantum-statistical mechanics. Bose’s paper dealt with photons, which have no mass. Einstein extended the idea by treating quantum particles with mass as being indistinguishable from one another for statistical purposes in certain cases. “The quanta or molecules are not treated as structures statistically independent of one another,” he wrote.48 The key insight, which Einstein extracted from Bose’s initial paper, has to do with how you calculate the probabilities for each possible state of multiple quantum particles. To use an analogy suggested by the Yale physicist Douglas Stone, imagine how this calculation is done for dice. In calculating the odds that the roll of two dice (A and B) will produce a lucky 7, we treat the possibility that A comes up 4 and B comes up 3 as one outcome, and we treat the possibility that A comes up 3 and B comes up 4 as a different outcome—thus counting each of these combinations as different ways to produce a 7. Einstein realized that the new way of calculating the odds of quantum states involved treating these not as two different possibilities, but only as one. A 4-3 combination was indistinguishable from a 3-4 combination; likewise, a 5-2 combination was indistinguishable from a 2-5. That cuts in half the number of ways two dice can roll a 7. But it does not affect the number of ways they could turn up a 2 or a 12 (using either counting method, there is only one way to roll each of these totals), and it only reduces from five to three the number of ways the two dice could total 6. A few minutes of jotting down possible outcomes shows how this system changes the overall odds of rolling any particular number. The changes wrought by this new calculating method are even greater if we are applying it to dozens of dice. And if we are dealing with billions of particles, the change in probabilities becomes huge.

When he applied this approach to a gas of quantum particles, Einstein discovered an amazing property: unlike a gas of classical particles, which will remain a gas unless the particles attract one another, a gas of quantum particles can condense into some kind of liquid even without a force of attraction between them. This phenomenon, now called Bose-Einstein condensation,* was a brilliant and important discovery in quantum mechanics, and Einstein deserves most of the credit for it. Bose had not quite realized that the statistical mathematics he used represented a fundamentally new approach. As with the case of Planck’s constant, Einstein recognized the physical reality, and the significance, of a contrivance that someone else had devised.49 Einstein’s method had the effect of treating particles as if they had wavelike traits, as both he and de Broglie had suggested. Einstein even predicted that if you did Thomas Young’s old double-slit experiment (showing that light behaved like a wave by shining a beam through two slits and noting the interference pattern) by using a beam of gas molecules, they would interfere with one another as if they were waves. “A beam of gas molecules which passes through an aperture,” he wrote, “must undergo a diffraction analogous to that of a light ray.

The two hit it off well, because de Broglie was trying, like Einstein, to see if there were ways that the causality and certainty of classical physics could be saved. He had been working on what he called “the theory of the double solution,” which he hoped would provide a classical basis for wave mechanics. “The indeterminist school, whose adherents were mainly young and intransigent, met my theory with cold disapproval,” de Broglie recalled. Einstein, on the other hand, appreciated de Broglie’s efforts, and he rode the train with him to Paris on his way back to Berlin. At the Gare du Nord they had a farewell talk on the platform. Einstein told de Broglie that all scientific theories, leaving aside their mathematical expressions, ought to lend themselves to so simple a description “that even a child could understand them.” And what could be less simple, Einstein continued, than the purely statistical interpretation of wave mechanics! “Carry on,” he told de Broglie as they parted at the station. “You are on the right track!” But he wasn’t. By 1928, a consensus had formed that quantum mechanics was correct, and de Broglie relented and adopted that view. “Einstein, however, stuck to his guns and continued to insist that the purely statistical interpretation of wave mechanics could not possibly be complete,” de Broglie recalled, with some reverence, years later.

To come now to the last point: can we call something with which the concepts of position and motion cannot be associated in the usual way, a thing, or a particle? And if not, what is the reality which our theory has been invented to describe? The answer to this is no longer physics, but philosophy, and to deal with it thoroughly would mean going far beyond the bounds of this lecture. I have given my views on it elsewhere. Here I will only say that I am emphatically in favour of the retention of the particle idea. Naturally, it is necessary to redefine what is meant. For this, well-developed concepts are available which appear in mathematics under the name of invariants in transformations. Every object that we perceive appears in innumerable aspects. The concept of the object is the invariant of all these aspects. From this point of view, the present universally used system of concepts in which particles and waves appear simultaneously, can be completely justified. The latest research on nuclei and elementary particles has led us, however, to limits beyond which this system of concepts itself does not appear to suffice. The lesson to be learned from what I have told of the origin of quantum mechanics is that probable refinements of mathematical methods will not suffice to produce a satisfactory theory, but that somewhere in our doctrine is hidden a concept, unjustified by experience, which we must eliminate to open up the road.

Prior to the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), the diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder had been referred to as Multiple Personality Disorder. The renaming of this diagnosis has caused quite a bit of confusion among professionals and those who live with DID. Because dissociation describes the process by which DID begins to develop, rather than the actual outcome of this process (the formation of various personalities), this new term may be a bit unclear. We know that the diagnosis is DID and that DID is what people say we have. We’d just like to point out that words sometimes do not describe what we live with. For people like us, DID is just a step on the way to where we live—a place with many of us inside! We just want people who have little ones and bigger ones living inside to know that the title Dissociative Identity Disorder sounds like something other than how we see ourselves—we think it is about us having different personalities. Regardless of the term, it is clear that, in general, the different personalities develop as a reaction to severe trauma. When the person dissociates, they leave their body to get away from the pain or trauma. When this defense is not strong enough to protect the person, different personalities emerge to handle the experience. These personalities allow the child to survive: when the child is being harmed or experiencing traumatic episodes, the other personalities take the pain and/ or watch the bad things. This allows these children to return to their body after the bad things have happened without any awareness of what has occurred. They do this to create different ways to make sense of the harm inflicted upon them; it is their survival mechanism.

All of this, I believe, indicates that in order to grasp the basic grammar of the world, we need to merge three basic ingredients, not just two: not just general relativity and quantum mechanics, but also the theory of heat, that is, statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, which we can also describe as "information theory." But the thermodynamics of general relativity-that is to say, the statistical mechanics of quanta of space-is as yet only in its early infancy. Everything is still confused, and there is a very great deal that remains to be understood.

Statistical mechanics interprets an increase of entropy as a decrease in order or, if we wish, as a decrease in our knowledge.

The theoretical understanding of what was going on was developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century using statistical mechanics –an approach to thermodynamics that is based on applying the laws of statistics to the behaviour of large numbers of particles, such as the huge number of atoms or molecules present in a box of gas, each of them acting in accordance with Newton’s laws.

Through intellectuals like Cowen and Brooks, capitalism is enjoying its sweetest dream. It has dreamed a place where the wealthy consort only with their mechanical creations and servants. It is a place where industry makes mostly those things needed by the rich. It is a place without suffering and the complaints of workers and the poor, most of whom have now “rationally chosen” to live in poverty colonies in unfortunate climes. Perhaps it is only a dream, a piece of economic whimsy, but labor statistic and anecdotes about les miserables suggest that it is real enough. These intellectuals are also making a wager: they are betting that the poor and low-paid half of the population will not know how to organize and will not revolt, especially if there is TV to watch and social programs that consist of not much more than free Hulu for the poor. Social isolation and anomie - the impotence of the canaille - is capitalism’s first line of defence against those it has dispossessed. They’re also betting that the poor will be mostly clueless about the reasons for and the meaning of their condition, so much so that they will be fervent supporters of the “freedoms” offered by their oppressors, especially the freedom to oppress. Capitalism’s cyborg dreams only confirm that it is the enemy of all dreams. If we wish to reclaim our right to be the dreamers, rather than the dreamt, we need to take the first step and sat, as e. e. cummings wrote, “there is some shit I will not eat.

The UPA government, instead of implementing the Supreme Court order—which would have been the defining indicator of its bona fides in retrieving the black money looted from the people of India— instead demanded a recall of the order. This establishes its complete mala fide, connivance and conspiracy, and confirms that it has no intention of taking any substantive steps to recover the black money stashed away abroad, or take any serious action to combat this grievous economic crime impoverishing our nation—the 21st century version of UPA imperialism. The nation should be informed that no investigation has taken place regarding the issues before it since the Supreme Court judgement, but the finance minister chose to conceal these extremely pertinent facts in his Paper. The White Paper coyly discussed the dimensions of black money stashed away abroad by quoting statistics that are more than a decade old, saying that these are being researched upon by three agencies whose report is expected in September 2012. From this it would appear that the government had no knowledge of the quantum of black money lying abroad. One wonders why the government presented the paper at this stage. Interestingly, the Paper officially disclosed a figure regarding Indian accounts held with Swiss banks, at around only US $213 billion (as against $88 billion projected by the International Monetary Fund, and $213.2 billion by GFI), down 60% between 2006 and 2010. A reasonable conclusion that can be drawn is that black money holders, in anticipation of international and national public pressure (not governmental) transferred their money to other safe havens, the safest, it is said, being India. The last two years have seen several enabling statutes and mechanisms to stealthily repatriate the ill-gotten wealth back to India. I am also given to understand that there is evidence of a huge disparity between export figures, particularly of metals quoted by the government, and actual exports through data available from independent sources. The same applies to figures regarding FIIs. The game is clear. Use every government tool and instrument available to repatriate the money to India, without disclosure, culpability or punishment. There must be ways, and ways that we can never fathom or document, but the black money holders control legislation, either through being important politicians, or big businesses, who can buy safe passage, necessary loopholes and escape routes through statute or legislation. The finance minister through his negligence and active cooperation with the criminals allowed the stolen money to be removed from the accounts in which it was held and only a small fraction now remains, which too he is determined to place beyond the reach of the people of India who are its legitimate owners.

A second and more powerful explanation looks to changes in the institutions of intellectual life. In this reading of late-twentieth-century U.S. history, the key to the age was the conscious efforts of conservative intellectuals and their institutional sponsors to reshape not only the terms of political debate but the mechanics of intellectual production itself. By the late 1970s, Nixon's former secretary of the Treasury, the Wall Street investor William E. Simon, was urging that "the only thing that can save the Republican Party . . . is a counterintelligentsia," created by funneling funds to writers, journalists, and social scientists whose ideas had been frozen out of general circulation by the "dominant socialist-statist-collectivist orthodoxy" prevailing in the universities and the media.12

He had made a discovery of the first magnitude. It opened up an entirely new approach to physics, which led to statistical mechanics, to a proper understanding of thermodynamics and to the use of probability distributions in quantum mechanics. If he had done nothing else, this breakthrough would have been enough to put him among the world's great scientists.

In the midst of World War II, Quincy Wright, a leader in the quantitative study of war, noted that people view war from contrasting perspectives: “To some it is a plague to be eliminated; to others, a crime which ought to be punished; to still others, it is an anachronism which no longer serves any purpose. On the other hand, there are some who take a more receptive attitude toward war, and regard it as an adventure which may be interesting, an instrument which may be legitimate and appropriate, or a condition of existence for which one must be prepared” Despite the millions of people who died in that most deadly war, and despite widespread avowals for peace, war remains as a mechanism of conflict resolution. Given the prevalence of war, the importance of war, and the enormous costs it entails, one would assume that substantial efforts would have been made to comprehensively study war. However, the systematic study of war is a relatively recent phenomenon. Generally, wars have been studied as historically unique events, which are generally utilized only as analogies or examples of failed or successful policies. There has been resistance to conceptualizing wars as events that can be studied in the aggregate in ways that might reveal patterns in war or its causes. For instance, in the United States there is no governmental department of peace with funding to scientifically study ways to prevent war, unlike the millions of dollars that the government allocates to the scientific study of disease prevention. This reluctance has even been common within the peace community, where it is more common to deplore war than to systematically figure out what to do to prevent it. Consequently, many government officials and citizens have supported decisions to go to war without having done their due diligence in studying war, without fully understanding its causes and consequences. The COW Project has produced a number of interesting observations about wars. For instance, an important early finding concerned the process of starting wars. A country’s goal in going to war is usually to win. Conventional wisdom was that the probability of success could be increased by striking first. However, a study found that the rate of victory for initiators of inter-state wars (or wars between two countries) was declining: “Until 1910 about 80 percent of all interstate wars were won by the states that had initiated them. . . . In the wars from 1911 through 1965, however, only about 40 percent of the war initiators won.” A recent update of this analysis found that “pre-1900, war initiators won 73% of wars. Since 1945 the win rate is 33%.”. In civil war the probability of success for the initiators is even lower. Most rebel groups, which are generally the initiators in these wars, lose. The government wins 57 percent of the civil wars that last less than a year and 78 percent of the civil wars lasting one to five years. So, it would seem that those initiating civil and inter-state wars were not able to consistently anticipate victory. Instead, the decision to go to war frequently appears less than rational. Leaders have brought on great carnage with no guarantee of success, frequently with no clear goals, and often with no real appreciation of the war’s ultimate costs. This conclusion is not new. Studying the outbreak of the first carefully documented war, which occurred some 2,500 years ago in Greece, historian Donald Kagan concluded: “The Peloponnesian War was not caused by impersonal forces, unless anger, fear, undue optimism, stubbornness, jealousy, bad judgment and lack of foresight are impersonal forces. It was caused by men who made bad decisions in difficult circumstances.” Of course, wars may also serve leaders’ individual goals, such as gaining or retaining power. Nonetheless, the very government officials who start a war are sometimes not even sure how or why a war started.

Atoms, elements and molecules are three important knowledge in Physics, chemistry and Biology. mathematics comes where counting starts, when counting and measurement started, integers were required. Stephen hawking says integers were created by god and everything else is work of man. Man sees pattern in everything and they are searched and applied to other sciences for engineering, management and application problems. Physics, it is required understand the physical nature or meaning of why it happens, chemistry is for chemical nature, Biology is for that why it happened. Biology touch medicine, plants and animals. In medicine how these atoms, elements and molecules interplay with each other by bondage is being explained. Human emotions and responses are because of biochemistry, hormones i e anatomy and physiology. This physiology deals with each and every organs and their functions. When this atom in elements are disturbed whatever they made i e macromolecules DNA, RNA and Protein and other micro and macro nutrients and which affects the physiology of different organs on different scales and then diseases are born because of this imbalance/ disturb in homeostasis. There many technical words are there which are hard to explain in single para. But let me get into short, these atoms in elements and molecules made interplay because of ecological stimulus i e so called god. and when opposite sex meets it triggers various responses on body of each. It is also harmone and they are acting because of atoms inside elements and continuous generation or degenerations of cell cycle. There is a god cell called totipotent stem cell, less gods are pluripotent, multi potent and noni potent stem cells. So finally each and every organ system including brain cells are affected because of interplay of atoms inside elements and their bondages in making complex molecules, which are ruled by ecological stimulus i e god. So everything is basically biology and medicine even for animals, plants and microbes and other life forms. process differs in each living organisms. The biggest mystery is Brain and DNA. Brain has lots of unexplained phenomenon and even dreams are not completely understood by science that is where spiritualism/ soul touches. DNA is long molecule which has many applications as genetic engineering. genomics, personal medicine, DNA as tool for data storage, DNA in panspermia theory and many more. So everything happens to women and men and other sexes are because of Biology, Medicine and ecology. In ecology every organisms are inter connected and inter dependent. Now physics - it touch all technical aspects but it needs mathematics and statistics to lay foundation for why and how it happened and later chemistry, biology also included inside physics. Mathematics gave raise to computers and which is for fast calculation on any applications in any sciences. As physiological imbalances lead to diseases and disorders, genetic mutations, again old concept evolution was retaken to understand how new biology evolves. For evolution and disease mechanisms, epidemiology and statistics was required and statistics was as a data tool considered in all sciences now a days. Ultimate science is to break the atoms to see what is inside- CERN, but it creates lots of mysterious unanswerable questions. laws in physics were discovered and invented with mathematics to understand the universe from atoms. Theory of everything is a long search and have no answers. While searching inside atoms, so many hypothesis like worm holes and time travel born but not yet invented as far as my knowledge. atom is universe, and humans are universe they have everything that universe has. ecology is god that affects humans and climate. In business these computerized AI applications are trying to figure out human emotions by their mechanism of writing, reading, texting, posting on social media and bla bla. Arts is trying to figure out human emotions in art way.

Dan Corrieri trained in engineering graphics, statistical process control, accounting manufacturing methods, finance, management, engineering economy, marketing, design processes in technology and engineering mechanics. Daniel Corrieri was a veteran of the United States Marine Corps Reserves with an honorable discharge. In addition, Daniel Corrieri has gained plenty of volunteer experience with Toys for Tots through the Marine Corps, community service for the American Cancer Society, church service and other excellent opportunities.

For instance, people who form early representations of the world as dangerous or uncontrollable may become anxious and start avoiding situations that they perceive as threatening. Avoidance is usually an adaptive response to danger; in this case, however, it prevents anxious individuals from learning that the environment is actually safer than they believe, thus locking them in a state of exaggerated anxiety. Even if such catastrophic failures of learning mechanisms are statistically rare, they can be highly maladaptive for the individuals who experience them.

in the higher stages of denial, ever-more-complex mechanisms are developed for explaining the unacceptable while maintaining a façade of social and moral normality.

Several physicists and mathematicians have been anxious to show that communication theory and its entropy are extremely important in connection with statistical mechanics.

The behavior of temperature and heat and so forth can certainly be understood in terms of atoms: That’s the subject known as “statistical mechanics.” But it can equally well be understood without knowing anything whatsoever about atoms: That’s the phenomenological approach we’ve been discussing, known as “thermodynamics.” It is a common occurrence in physics that in complex, macroscopic systems, regular patterns emerge dynamically from underlying microscopic rules. Despite the way it is sometimes portrayed, there is no competition between fundamental physics and the study of emergent phenomena; both are fascinating and crucially important to our understanding of nature.

These examples illustrate that the laws of macroscopic bodies are quite different from those of mechanics or electromagnetic theory.

This division of macroscopic physics into thermodynamics and statistical mechanics is largely of historical origin. We shall not follow this development. Instead we shall emphasize the unity of the subject, showing how the two aspects illuminate each other, and we shall use whichever is more appropriate.

The second approach to macroscopic physics is that of statistical mechanics. This starts from the atomic constitution of matter and endeavours to derive the laws of macroscopic bodies from the atomic properties.

There are two aspects to statistical mechanics. One aim is to derive the thermodynamic laws of macroscopic bodies from the laws governing their atomic behaviour. This is a fascinating but very difficult field. Nowadays one has a fairly general understanding of the underlying physics but most physicists working in the field would probably agree that no real proofs exist.

mechanics is to derive the properties of a macroscopic system — for example, its equation of state — from its microscopic properties.

LET’S ALL GET FAT AND JUMP OFF BRIDGES How many times have you heard how few people exercise and eat enough fruits and vegetables, choosing to binge on TV and sugar- and fat-laden foods instead? These types of statistics are supposed to “scare us straight,” but to those addicted to reruns and junk food, the data is music to their ears. It reminds them of the comforting reality that they’re not alone—that everyone else is just like them. And if everyone is doing it, how wrong can it really be? You may not be one of those people, but don’t think you’re immune to the underlying psychological mechanisms. It’s comforting to think that we singularly chart our own course in our lives, uninfluenced by how other people think and act, but it’s simply not true. Extensive psychological and marketing research has shown that what others do—and even what we think they do—has a marked effect on our choices and behaviors, especially when the people we’re observing are close to us.29 In the world of marketing, this effect is known as “social proof,” and it’s a well-established principle used in myriad ways to influence us to buy. When we’re not sure how to think or act, we tend to look at how other people think and act and follow along, even if subconsciously. Whenever we justify behaviors as acceptable because of all the other people doing it too or because of how “normal” it is, we’re appealing to social proof. We can pick up anything from temporary solutions to long-term habits this way, and both people we know and even people we see in movies can influence us.30 For example, having obese friends and family members dramatically increases your risk of becoming obese as well.31 The

The fact is that mechanical laws of motion allow an almost incomprehensibly large number of different possible situations. Interesting structure and order arise only in the tiniest fraction of them. Scientists feel they should not invoke miracles to explain the order we see, but that leaves only statistical arguments, which give bleak answers (only dull situations can be expected), or the so-called anthropic principle that if the world were not in a highly structured but extremely unlikely state, we should not exist and be here to observe it.

If you look at all the vitamin studies done on more than a thousand people in the last few decades, almost all of them have shown an increased risk of cancer. Some of these results were statistical, but some were not. The body likes to create free radicals to attack bad cells, including cancerous ones. If you block that mechanism by taking copious vitamins, especially those touted as antioxidants, you block your body’s natural ability to control itself. You block a physiological process. You disrupt a system we don’t fully understand yet.

Epistemology, the philosophy of history, and statistics aim at understanding truths, investigating the mechanisms that generate them, and separating regularity from the coincidental in historical matters. They all address the question of what one knows, except that they are all to be found in different buildings, so to speak.

Statistics became what it still is today: a form of political rhetoric. The categories that statisticians had to develop were reified in the hands of government bureaucracies. Categories that statistics made technically necessary—classes, strata, castes, ethnic groups—acquired the power to mold reality for administrative departments and, indeed, in society’s perception of itself. Statistics had two faces: a tool for sociological description and explanation, and a powerful mechanism for stereotyping and labeling people

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The grandfather of this brilliant madness was Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, whose proof that gas molecules disperse in proportion to their temperature was foundational to all that followed. Boltzmann showed that molecular movement is simply determined by probability, which results in concentrations of molecules dispersing until they reach equilibrium with their environment. If you pour a potful of boiling water into a cold bath, hot water molecules spread out until they are evenly distributed and have slightly raised the overall bath temperature. Time cannot go backward for the same reason that boiling water can’t re-form in one corner of a cold bath and the dead cannot return to life: random probability will never re-concentrate those molecules back into their original form. The branch of physics pioneered by Boltzmann was called statistical mechanics, and it explained one of the fundamental laws of nature: the Second Law of Thermodynamics, also known as entropy.

Even in the equations that had been formulated to describe electromagnetism, there is no natural directionality to the interactions of particles; the equations look the same going both directions. If you looked at a video of atoms interacting, you could play it backward and you wouldn’t be able to tell which was correct. It is only in the macroworld of objects, people, planets, and so on, the world governed by entropy, that causation appears to unfold in a single direction. The second law of thermodynamics describes the increasing disorder in the universe at macroscales and is often seen as equivalent to the one-way arrow of time. More and more physicists over the past few decades, sensitive to the nondirectionality that seems to rule at the micro or quantum level, have begun to question the no-teleology rule. Recall that the tiny particles making up the matter and energy of the physical universe are really like worms or strings snaking through the block universe of Minkowski spacetime. Their interactions, which look to us a bit like tiny balls colliding on a billiard table, are from a four-dimensional perspective more like threads intertwining; the twists and turns where they wrap around each other are what we see as collisions, interactions, and “measurements” (in the physicists’ preferred idiom). Each interaction changes information associated with those threads—their trajectory through the block universe (position and momentum) as well as qualities like “spin” that influence that trajectory. According to some recent theories, a portion of the information particles carry with them actually might propagate backward rather than forward across their world lines. For instance, an experiment at the University of Rochester in 2009 found that photons in a laser beam could be amplified in their past when interacted with a certain way during a subsequent measurement—true backward causation, in other words.8 The Israeli-American physicist Yakir Aharonov and some of his students are now arguing that the famous uncertainty principle—the extent to which the outcome of an interaction is random and unpredictable—may actually be a measure of the portion of future influence on a particle’s behavior.9 In other words, the notorious randomness of quantum mechanics—those statistical laws that captured Jung’s imagination—may be where retrocausation was hiding all along. And it would mean Einstein was right: God doesn’t play dice.*23 If the new physics of retrocausation is correct, past and future cocreate the pattern of reality built up from the threads of the material world. The world is really woven like a tapestry on a four-dimensional loom. It makes little sense to think of a tapestry as caused by one side only;

In Newtonian physics, the connection between ping and pong appears mechanical and deterministic (A pushes and B gets pushed, etc.); in thermodynamics, the connection appears mechanical and statistical (when enough A's bounce around enough, they will hit enough B's to get the B's bouncing, too); in electromagnetism, the connection appears as the intersection or interaction of fields; in Relativity, the connection appears as a result of the curvature of space (which we call "gravity"); but the correlation, in any case, involves some sort of connection.

the principal reason why many scientists were (and many still are) very skeptical toward the notion that the avian compass could be governed by quantum mechanics. You may remember that, when discussing this issue in chapter 1, we described the quantum properties of matter as being “washed away” by the random arrangement of molecules in big objects. With our thermodynamic insight we can now see the source of that dissipation: it is the billiard-ball-like molecular jostling that Schrödinger identified as the source of the “order from disorder” statistical laws. Scattered particles can be realigned to reveal their hidden quantum depths, but only in special circumstances and usually only very briefly.

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As Hippocrates would have predicted, scores of other studies on the effects of physical activity on morbidity and mortality yield similar results.61 That doesn’t mean, however, that physical activity is a surefire Fountain of Youth, and remember it doesn’t delay mortality by preventing aging per se. Instead, physical activity triggers a suite of mechanisms that increase the chances of staying healthy with age by retarding senescence and preventing many chronic diseases that contribute over time to mortality. This logic raises three vitally important insights that help explain the Donald Trumps of the world who don’t die young in spite of being sedentary and overweight. First, and most fundamentally, the mortality and morbidity statistics I have been citing are probabilities. Eating sensibly and exercising don’t guarantee long life and good health; they just decrease the risk of getting sick. By the same token, smokers have a higher risk of getting lung cancer, and individuals who are unfit or obese are more likely to get heart disease or become diabetic, but plenty don’t. Second, advances in medical care are shifting the relationship between morbidity and mortality.62 Conditions like diabetes, heart disease, and some cancers are no longer imminent death sentences but instead can be treated or held at bay for years with drugs that maintain blood sugar levels, decrease harmful cholesterol levels, lower blood pressure, and combat mutant cells. In Donald Trump’s case, for example, his reportedly normal blood pressure and cholesterol levels likely reflect the medications he takes to lower these risk factors.63

In a little more detail, why is the Bitcoin blockchain so resistant to the rewriting of history? To falsify the “who” of a single transaction you’d need to fake a digital signature, to falsify the “what” you’d need to break a hash function, to falsify the “when” you’d need to corrupt a timestamp, and you’d need to do this while somehow not breaking all the other records cryptographically connected to that transaction through the mechanism of composed block headers. Some call the Bitcoin blockchain a timechain, because unlike many other blockchains, its proof-of-work mechanism and difficulty adjustment ensure a statistically regular time interval between blocks, crucial to its function as a digital history.

What's in a name? In the case of Shannon's measure the naming was not accidental. In 1961 one of us (Tribus) asked Shannon what he had thought about when he had finally confirmed his famous measure. Shannon replied: “My greatest concern was what to call it. I thought of calling it ‘information,’ but the word was overly used, so I decided to call it ‘uncertainty.’ When I discussed it with John von Neumann, he had a better idea. Von Neumann told me, ‘You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name. In the second place, and more important, no one knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.

The form of argument used by Farjoun and Machover is rather alien to the tradition of political economy. The later has tended, from its inception, to look for explanations in terms of the actions of rational profit maximising individuals directing the economy towards some sort of equilibrium. Instead Farjoun and Machover, who were mathematicians not economists, imported the form of reasoning that had been used in thermodynamics or statistical mechanics. This branch of physics deals with the behaviour of large complex systems with huge numbers of degrees of freedom. The classical example of this type of system is gas composed of huge numbers of randomly moving molecules. In such a system it is fruitless to try and form a deterministic and microscopic picture of the interaction of individual molecules. But you can make a number of useful deductions about the statistical properties of the whole collection of molecules. It was from the statistical properties of such collections that Boltzmann was able to derive the laws of thermodynamics[Bol95]. What Farjoun and Machover did was apply this form of reasoning to another chaotic system with a large number of degrees of freedom : the market economy. In doing this they initiated a new discipline of study : econophysics. This, in a very radical way, views the economy as a process without a subject. It assumes nothing about knowing subjects, instead it attempts to apply the principle of parsimony. It assumes nothing about the individual economic actors. Instead it theorises the aggregate constraints and and statistical distributions of the system that arise from the assumption of maximal disorder. A such this approach is anathema to the subjectivist Austrian school9.

In the over-a-hundred-years of the history of the Second Law, people were puzzled by the apparent conflict between the reversibility of the equations of motion, and the irreversibility associated with the Second Law. Boltzmann was the first to attempt to derive the Second Law from the dynamics of the particles. In my opinion, this, as well as other attempts, will inevitably fail in principle. First, because it is impractical to solve the equations of motion for some 1023 particles. Second, because one cannot get probabilities from the deterministic equations of motion. Third, and perhaps most important, because of the indistinguishability of the particles. It is well known that whenever we write the equation of motions of any number of particles, we must first label the particles. This is true for classical as well as for the quantum mechanical equations of motion. However, the very act of labeling the particles violates the principle of ID of the particles.

The fact that we are now dealing in probabilities is not, presumably, because we do not know enough about the particle. Matrix mechanics says you have all the information you can possibly have. Yet, if you take a million identically prepared particles in the same state (the same combination of states A and B) and perform a million identical measurements, then, on average, x2 number of times you will find the particle in state A, y2 of the time you’ll find it in state B. But you can never predict the answer you’ll get for any single particle. You can only talk statistically. Nature, it seems, is not deterministic in the quantum realm. Recall that something similar happens with the double slit. We cannot predict where exactly a single photon will land on the screen—we can only assign probabilities for where it might go.

The fact that we are now dealing in probabilities is not, presumably, because we do not know enough about the particle. Matrix mechanics says you have all the information you can possibly have. Yet, if you take a million identically prepared particles in the same state (the same combination of states A and B) and perform a million identical measurements, then, on average, x2 number of times you will find the particle in state A, y2 of the time you’ll find it in state B. But you can never predict the answer you’ll get for any single particle. You can only talk statistically. Nature, it seems, is not deterministic in the quantum realm.

A common feature of epidemiological data is that they are almost certain to be biased, of doubtful quality, or incomplete (and sometimes all three),” explained the epidemiologist John Bailar in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1980. “Problems do not disappear even if one has flawless data, since the statistical associations in almost any nontrivial set of observations are subject to many interpretations. This ambiguity exists because of the difficulty of sorting out causes, effects, concomitant variables, and random fluctuations when the causes are multiple or diffuse, the exposure levels low, irregular, or hard to measure, and the relevant biologic mechanisms poorly understood. Even when the data are generally accepted as accurate, there is much room for individual judgment, and the considered conclusions of the investigators on these matters determine what they will label ‘cause’…

In other words, while they would in general admit that some kinds of statistical laws are consistent with the assumption of further individual laws operating in a broader context, they believe that quantum mechanics could never satisfactorily be regarded as a law of this kind. The statistical features of the quantum theory are thus regarded as representing a kind of irreducible lawlessness of individual phenomena in the quantum domain. All individual laws (e.g. classical mechanics) are then regarded as limiting cases of the probability laws of the quantum theory, approximately valid for systems involving large numbers of molecules.

The omnipotence of God makes no sense if it requires the all-causingness of God. Good people quit God altogether at this point, and throw out the baby with the bath, perhaps because they last looked into God in their childhoods, and have not changed their views of divinity since. It is not the tooth fairy. In fact, even Aquinas dissolved the fatal problem of natural, physical evil by tinkering with God’s omnipotence. Again, Paul writes to the Christians in Rome: “In all things God works for the good of those who love him.” When was that? I missed it. In China, in Israel, in the Yemen, in the Ecuadoran Andes and the Amazon basin, in Greenland, Iceland, and Baffin Island, in Europe, on the shore of the Beaufort Sea inside the Arctic Circle, and in Costa Rica, in the Marquesas Islands and the Tuamotus, and in the United States, I have seen the rich sit secure on their thrones and send the hungry away empty. If God’s escape clause is that he gives only spiritual things, then we might hope that the poor and suffering are rich in spiritual gifts, as some certainly are, but as some of the comfortable are too. Maybe “all your actions show your wisdom and love” means that the precious few things we know that God did, and does, are in fact unambiguous in wisdom and love, and all other events derive not from God but only from blind chance, just as they seem to. What, then, of the bird-headed dwarfs? It need not craze us, I think, to know we are evolving, like other living forms, according to physical processes. Statistical probability describes the mechanism of evolution—chance operating on large numbers— That is, evolution’s “every success is necessarily paid for by a large percentage of failures.” In order to live at all, we pay “a mysterious tribute of tears, blood, and sin.

While farming held its ground, the logging and mining industries plummeted from the strong positions of the past. To put it in perspective, timber sustained roughly 63% of all jobs in Washington State in 1910. As of 2015, however, mining and logging accounted for less than half of 1% of the civilian labor force in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.38 Mechanization and increased efficiency in logging contributed significantly to the decline.

Returning from Germany to Italy in late summer of 1923, Fermi found his interest turning increasingly to statistical mechanics, a subject that would allow

And so from a statistical mechanical model, Belady and Lehman arrive for programming-systems at a more general conclusion supported by the experience of all the earth. "Things are always at their best in the beginning," said Pascal. C. S.

And so from a statistical mechanical model, Belady and Lehman arrive for programming-systems at a more general conclusion supported by the experience of all the earth. "Things are always at their best in the beginning," said Pascal.

Unfortunately, the selection mechanism is often some combination of beauty and shock value, rather than pertinence and accuracy.

YouTube: "Jordan Peterson | The Most Terrifying IQ Statistic" JORDAN PETERSON: One of the most terrifying statistics I ever came across was one detailing out the rationale of the United States Armed Forces for not allowing the induct … you can't induct anyone into the Armed Forces into the Armed Forces in the U.S. if they have an IQ of less than 83. Okay, so let's just take that apart for a minute, because it's a horrifying thing. So, the U.S. Armed Forces have been in the forefront of intelligence research since World War I because they were onboard early with the idea that, especially during war time when you are ramping up quickly that you need to sort people effectively and essentially without prejudice so that you can build up the officer corps so you don't lose the damned war, okay. So, there is real motivation to get it right, because it's a life-and-death issue, so they used IQ. They did a lot of the early psychometric work on IQ. Okay, so that's the first thing, they are motivated to find an accurate predictor, so they settled on IQ. The second thing was, the United States Armed Forces is also really motivated to get people into the Armed Forces, peacetime or wartime. Wartime, well, for obvious reasons. Peacetime, because, well, first of all you've got to keep the Armed Forces going and second you can use the Armed Forces during peacetime as a way of taking people out of the underclass and moving them up into the working class or the middle class, right. You can use it as a training mechanism, and so left and right can agree on that, you know. It's a reasonable way of promoting social mobility. So again, the Armed Forces even in peacetime is very motivated to get as many people in as they possibly can. And it's difficult as well. It's not that easy to recruit people, so you don't want to throw people out if you don't have to. So, what's the upshot of all that? Well, after one hundred years, essentially, of careful statistical analysis, the Armed Forces concluded that if you had an IQ of 83 or less there wasn't anything you could possibly be trained to do in the military at any level of the organization that wasn't positively counterproductive. Okay, you think, well, so what, 83, okay. Yeah, one in ten! One in ten! That's one in ten people! And what that really means, as far as I can tell, is if you imagine that the military is approximately as complex as the broader society, which I think is a reasonable proposition, then there is no place in our cognitively complex society for one in ten people. So what are we going to do about that? The answer is, no one knows. You say, "well, shovel money down the hierarchy." It's like, the problem isn't lack of money. I mean sometimes that's the problem, but the problem is rarely absolute poverty. It's rarely that. It is sometimes, but rarely. It's not that easy to move money down the hierarchy. So, first of all, it's not that easy to manage money. So, it's a vicious problem, man. And so... INTERVIEWER: It's hard to train people to become creative, adaptive problem solvers. PETERSON: It's impossible! You can't do it! You can't do it! You can interfere with their cognitive ability, but you can't do that! The training doesn't work. INTERVIEWER: It's not going to work in six months, but it could have worked in six years. PETERSON: No, it doesn't work. Sorry, it doesn't work. The data on that is crystal clear. [note that “one in ten” applies to a breeding group with an average IQ of 100]

Intention-to-treat comes from the realization that, in some experiments, you don’t know who followed the protocol and who didn’t. In a clinic, you may write a prescription and not know if it’s been filled. In this case, you have no choice but to include everybody’s performance. The mechanical application of the idea in situations where you do know who complied and who didn’t is another misunderstanding and dogmatic application of statistics. ITT usually makes the better diet look worse than it actually is.

What economists and political scientists today call the “rational choice of individuals,” but what Smith called “the individual pursuit of happiness,” leads according to this view in a mechanical way to general welfare. As Alexander Pope in his Essay on Man put it: “true Self Love and Social are the same.” While this is the foundation of liberal capitalism, Marx’s dialectical materialism is not different in its selection of the economy as the prime mover. In this way the economy becomes the most important purpose of society. Fortunately, the economy has laws of causation, or, at least, that is what economists would like us to believe. Statistics are gathered to provide an objectified view of reality that enables social engineering. The individual and the collective are simultaneously put in an economic framework that is secular not in the sense that it is nonreligious, since individuals can rationally pursue religious ends, but in the sense that a God-given order of society has been replaced by an order that is constantly produced by homo economicus” (p. 41).

Something, which the police called a bomb, had exploded in his shed. Investigations were begun, and the efforts of the authorities were soon to be categorized by the appropriate officals as "feverish", for bombs began to go off all over the place. The police collected fragments of the exploded bombs, and the press, anxious to help the police in their work, published impressive pictures of the fragments as well as a drawing of a reconstructed bomb together with a very detailed description of how it had been made.The police had done a really first-rate job. Even my brother and myself, both of us extremely untalented men in technical matters, could easily grasp how the bomb makers had gone to work. A large quantity of ordinary black gunpowder, such as is the be found in the cartridges sold for shoutguns, was encased in plasticine; in it was embedded an explosive cap, of the type used in hand grenades during the war, at the end of a thin wire; the other end of the wire was joined to the battery of a pocket flashlight -- obtainable at any village store -- and thence to the alarm mechanism of an ordinary alarm clock. The whole contratation was packed into a soapbox. Of course my brother did his duty as a journalist.He published the police report, together with the illustrations, on page one. It was not my brother's doing that this issue of the paper had a most spectacular success and that for weeks men were still buying it; no. the credit for that must go to the police; they had done their bit to ensure that the peasantry of Schleswig-Holstein would have a healthy occupation during the long winter evenings. Instead of just sitting and indulging in stupid thoughts, or doing crossword puzzles, or assembling to hear inflamatory speeches, the peasantery was henceforth quetly and busily engaged in procuring soapboxes and alarm clock and flashlight batteries. And then the bombs really began to go of.... Nobody ever asked me what I was actually doing in Schleswig=Holstein, save perhaps Dr. Hirschfeldt, a high official in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, who had recently taken to frequenting Salinger's salon. Occasionally, and casually, he would glance at ne with his green eyes an honour me with a question, such as: "And what are the peasants up to in the north?" To which I would usually only reply: "Thank you for your interest. According to the statistics, the standard of living is going up -- in particular, there has been in increased demand for alarm clocks.