From: rat@erg.sri.com (Ray Trent)
Subject: Re: dragons were dinosaurs?
Reply-To: rat@erg.sri.com (Ray Trent)
Organization: SRI International, Menlo Park, CA
Date: Fri, 21 Aug 92 19:00:34 GMT

In the referenced article, iwsbarke@acs.ucalgary.ca (I W Scott Barker) writes:
>> trademark.  Assuming something is impossible absent any evidence that it
>> is _is_ bad science.  However, the fossil record is more than sufficiently
>> complete that we _can_ say that it is impossible that humans and dinosaurs
>> ever co-existed.
>
>Indeed. And has every piece of dirt in the world been dug up to prove that?
>Who is to say that there isn't some evidence somewhere? I'm not necessarily
>agreeing that dinos and humans co-existed, but unless you are some kind of
>omnipotent being, you cannot *prove* anything is impossible.

No, that's not the point. People over the years have tried to create a
purely inductive logic that would allow one to prove that something
is impossible. The fact that no one has yet succeeded may mean that
such a logic is itself impossible, or it may not mean that, but the
idea is at least self-consistent and supportable.

The ideas of astrology (as popularly stated), ESP (as popularly
stated), and unintended acceleration (as popularly stated) are neither
self-consistent nor supportable. In fact, in this case, all three
require that one believe a contradiction in order to accept them.
However, it is provable that the acceptance of any contradiction
whatsoever leads to *everything* being true. Since this is an
undesireable trait of any logical system, it is generally taken as
"proof" that something is not true.

In the case of astrology, the claims that are made violate general
relativity in several ways (among others, any possible influence that
the birth position of any planets could have on a person's life are
indistinguishable and much smaller than the effects that the mass of
the delivering physician would have), and the only reasonable way out
of this is to call upon quantum mechanics. Unfortunately, even if you
dismiss the proof of the non-existance of hidden variables, the
probability of a general planetary effect is *so* low that all other
factors swamp it by *100s* of orders of magnitude. 

There is a *much* more plausible explanation for the apparant
successes of astrologers: if you train an entire culture from birth
that "Leo's are aggressive", the psychological effect that this has is
*extremely likely* to create a correlation between Leo-ship and
agressiveness. Everything we know about human beings points in the
direction of supporting this hypothesis. Nothing we know, whatsoever,
supports the astrology hypothesis. 

You are welcome to believe in it anyway if you like, and there is a
(very very very small) chance that you would be correct, however,
unless *any* evidence comes up to support that position, I'm afraid I
must consider it *utter and complete nonsense* in order to preserve my
own sanity and effectiveness in dealing with the world. The fact that
this would cause me to consider you an utter and complete fool for
believing it can easily be rationalized in the same way.

>> For an enormous range of cars, from different manufacturers and with no part
>>   in common to suddenly and mysteriously gain the miraculous power to
>>   accelerate so far beyond their designed maximum rates that it is beyond 
>
>Well, I've got you there. My car did in fact accelerate out of control for
>no apparent reason once. Luckily, I didn't hit anyone, and did not go out of
>control, however, the only way I could stop it was to turn it off. The engine
>revved so much that the brakes *were* useless, even though they were
>functioning perfectly. After shutting it off, neither I nor the mechanic I

This particular claim requires believing a contradiction. There is no
physical way that an engine can produce more horsepower than can be
created from burning the maximum amount of air that it can draw in
which is limited by the physical dimensions of the cylinders and the
throttle plate.  Unless you've bent a throttle plate, opened a crack
somewhere in the intake system, bolted on a turbocharger, bored out
the engine, added nitrous, were driving in a seriously oxygen enriched
atmosphere, etc., there is no consistent way that your engine could
produce more than its maximum rated horsepower regardless of what
speed it was revving at. At the same time, all brakes are required to
be designed such that, when properly functioning, they are capable of
producing more horsepower of drag than the engine is capable of
producing in thrust, by a fairly wide safety margin.

There are only 3 remotely likely explanations for your observed event:
either your brake system is not functioning properly in a way that
neither you nor your mechanic were able or qualified to find, or there
was a one time failure of your brake system which coincided (at
extremely low probability) with a one time failure of the design of
your engine or a one time failure in your throttle or, alternatively,
your foot was on the accelerator when you thought it was on the brake.
To avoid any hint of ad hominum attack, I will generously admit that I
believe one of the former in your specific case.

However, to believe the claim posited by the original poster, that
thousands of unrelated designs worldwide exhibit this behavior
regularly requires either believing in a malicious automobile god or
in the contradiction that the brakes were not functioning properly
when they were "functioning properly". Anything else is so low
probability that I'd rather walk through a nearly infinite number of
plate glass walls waiting for the one that my body decides to quantum
tunnel through. To believe that there is something special about
automatic transmissions that makes them 1000s of times more likely to
experience this failure requires disbelieving the nearly infinitely
more likely explanation that the vast majority of cases of this
behavior are caused by driver error that is not cancelled by the
reflex to disengage the clutch on a manual transmission.

-- 
"When you're down, it's a long way up
 When you're up, it's a long way down
 It's all the same thing
 And it's no new tale to tell"                      ../ray\..
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.science