Opportunity Does Not Explain Crime

Being impossible to refute and easy to vary, opportunity is a very bad explanation for crime. Read about Laycock's Mistake here: http://www.bestthinking.com/articles/science/applied_science/opportunity-is-a-very-bad-explanation-for-crime-a-critique-of-crime-science-s-dependence-upon-it

Pareidolia

We humans are pattern recognising creatures. Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon where the watcher or listener perceives an image or sound to be significant.



In this video that I took while on holiday in Jamaica this year, it looks like a demon appears in the window glass. In reality it is no more than a weird looking random stain left by condensation. The 'demon' first seems to appear because the light refracting through the glass renders it invisible until I walk around to capture it at the right angle with my handy HD camera.

The Skeptick's Dictionary has more information on pareidolia

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Imagining The Anti Swan

Karl Popper essentially falsified the idea that knowledge about something can be obtained from past observations (events). Famously, he used the example of what we once thought we knew about swans. If the only swans that had ever been observed by those classifying them were white was it correct to say that all swans are white? No. Because after black swans were discovered in Australasia those previously unimagined swans overturned existing knowledge. Popper essentially demonstrated what is today known as the fallacy of induction.

The impact of the improbable, based on Popper’s (1959) fallacy of induction, is a theme that has been very successfully exploited by many authors. One, whose best selling book I am currently reading, is Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Taleb’s book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Allen Lane/Penguin Books 2007), develops the black swan example in many areas of life to assert that social science and economic experts essentially know little more about their subject than the man in the street. The reason for this is that they fail to take account of chaos and uncertainty in the world. In the affairs of man there are too many possible and complex ‘known unknowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns’ for us to predict what will happen next. Yet, surely, if you cannot say what something will do next then you really don’t understand it at all.

Terrorism experts, for example, failed to predict 9/11. Economists failed to predict the economic crash. And in my own field we criminologists all failed to predict the 15 year crime drop in the western industrialized world.

The point of this blog post is that I have an issue with Popper’s fallacy of induction. One that the self-admitted black swan obsessive Taleb has, as far as I can tell, failed to see. My issue is that Taleb, among other Popperians, does not allow for the possibility that the entire fallacy of induction would be falsified itself if a mega black swan event came along (e.g. something as improbable as progress in quantum computing serendipitously making it possible to accurately predict future ‘black swan-type events’ in the affairs of man by analyzing past events.

My key argument here is that Popper's refutation of induction is in fact, ironically, based on induction because the falsification of induction is itself based on past knowledge of the failure of the inductive method to know the present and predict the future.

If a new discovery does overturn existing orthodoxy so that induction becomes a good method of knowing the future we should be prepared to name such an event The Anti-Swan.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Professor Michael Smithson for kindly sharing his thoughts on my ideas on this issue: Click here to see our brief discussion about this issue on his blog.

References

Popper, K. R. (1959) The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London. Routledge.

Taleb, N. N. (2007) The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Allen Lane/Penguin Books.

Quantum Physics and a Possible Infintiy Paradox: My Personal Dysology

I published an article recently about my own personal confusion regarding David Deutsch's thesis that good ideas have infinite reach. You can read it over at the Best Thinking peer-to-peer website:

The Meme Muncher. By Mike Sutton 2011 (All Rights Reserved)


Under certain conditions, it seems that quantum mechanics predicts that good ideas if they are stored on physical objects such as paper, in books or on electronic devices - even though they have potential for infinite reach - can be annihilated into a singularity if they are moved at a particular rate into infinity. From this, it seems to me that on the face of it at least, that David Deutsch's theses has at least one interestingly ironic exception.

However, I expect that I am missing something important that is either not fully explained by Deutsch, or else it was but I simply failed to understand it in his excellent book (Deutsch 2011), which is aimed at everyone including quantum physics duffers, such as me, as well as experts.

Let me explain my confusion

What if a good idea was transcribed only once, the author died and the device it was recorded on was transported at the necessary rate into infinity? If that idea was the best explanation for how such an idea would be annihilated into a singularity and it could be annihilated in that way by the process of being sent into infinity how can our best ideas be said to have infinite reach?

I expect that I've got this wrong, but given the explanation Professor David Deutsch provides in his book regarding how a puppy vanishes from the universe in Herbert's Grand Infinity Hotel does not explain - to me at least -why the puppy vanished. I can't debunk the idea that if infinity deletes a good explanation then good explanations do not necessarily have infinite reach. And if only Deutsch had used his book as an analogy rather than the weird example of a puppy in a rubbish sack then he would have needed to address this 'threat to theory'.

Of course, one answer to my conundrum is that anyone could destroy a good explanation before it became a meme. We might wonder, for example, how many good explanations were wiped out by the Nazi holocaust before they could be published.

I would welcome any comments that can help me to clear up this matter in my mind - by way of the comments section on this blog would be most appreciated.

Mike Sutton 13th June 2011

Reference:

Deutsch, D. (2011) The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that transform the world. London. Penguin Books.

Sutton, M (2011) Explanations Annihilated in Hilbert's Grand Infinity Hotel. Best Thinking.

http://www.bestthinking.com/articles/science/physics/quantum_physics/explanations-annihilated-in-hilbert-s-grand-infinity-hotel

Dysology the Blog Site of Dysology.org

What is Dysology?

Dysology is the study of orthodox bias, academic blind spots, irrationality, pseudo scholarship and fraud influencing bad social science research, bad science, bad policymaking, quackery, counterknowledge, 'voodoo histrories', 'voodoo criminology' 'flat earth news' and other ignorance.

Visit dysology.org to learn more.

On the dysology web site I am exploring the usefulness of developing a multidisciplinary approach to the discovery and understanding of bad research and strange lack of research in some key areas of scholarship and policymaking.