in reply to Freedom in the rearview mirror

That programming languages can reflect life is something I agree with you on: particularly concepts such as "model-view-controller". Consider that we as humans are all data, the view is the media, and control is the governments. Does this mean that a different culture contains human beings fundamentally different to us? No. We are all just data, manipulated and viewed in different ways.

I would go further to suggest that Engineering (or applied sciences) are reflective of almost every other subject. Consider psycology. Students/practicing psycologists consider themselves able to analyse others.. yet I believe this is nonsense. The Nyquist theorem states that to reproduce a signal you must sample at twice the highest frequency of the source.. and correspondingly I believe you can't analyse someone else unless you're twice as smart as they are.. otherwise someone smarter may appear much dumber as you instead interpret a baseband response.

Systems and Control, and Fourier Analysis says a lot more about the world and human behaviour than all the other self-proclaimed experts. But of course, how would they understand this?

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Re^2: Freedom in the rearview mirror
by salva (Canon) on Jun 04, 2005 at 13:50 UTC
    The Nyquist theorem states that ...

    that is nonsense, you are extrapolating a rule from one domain to another completelly different, you are incurring into a false analogy.

    Following your reasoning, one could also assert that maps are useless because they have to be twice the size of the land they represent.

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      I'm not so sure the analogy is as purported..

      Remember, that to completely describe and render the land that is represented by a map it, indeed, must be sampled at twice the resolution of the finest point you want to represent. However when viewing a map all you're interested in is the general shape and scale of a landmass, not every blade of grass. Hence it is acceptable to sample at a lower frequency that still represents the view you're looking for.

      Understanding the nuances of a human being, however, is incredibly complex. From your post, then, do you believe you can summarise and analyse your fellow mates accurately with the limited view you have of them? Do you understand what it is to be them? Have you got a large enough sample?

      Whilst your post is a good warning against mistakenly applying one theorem from a known domain to another, it would help if you explained your confidence in the reply given above..

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        From your post, then, do you believe you can summarise and analyse your fellow mates accurately with the limited view you have of them?

        No, my point is that this is not the objetive of the psychology science, it doesn't claim to accurately analyse human beings.

        Psychology just looks for common high level patterns in human behaviour and then tries to match them on individuals for practical pourposes. As an science it is just applied statistics, a foundation as solid as that of other sciences like for instance, signal processing...

        Obviously there are bad psychologists, actually I would agree that most of them know very little about maths, but most of them know they are copping with uncertainty and that their predictions are just that: predictions, so, they are no so bad after all.

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