in reply to Re^2: Freedom in the rearview mirror
in thread Freedom in the rearview mirror

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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Re^4: Freedom in the rearview mirror
by salva (Canon) on Jun 05, 2005 at 01:14 UTC
    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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      From my limited sampling of psychology students, I can only deduce the typical psychologist is even more messed up than I am, and they have entered the field so they can understand themselves.

      And even if they're not completely crazy, odds are that someone in their immediate family is.

      I haven't sampled every physcologist twice yet, so it's possible that this bias is just due to my limited sample size.

[reply]

        In my experience your suggestion that Psych students are all 'bent' or closely related to someone 'bent' ('bent' being a non-scientific catchall) is a truism. I posit that people are fractally complex (the closer you look at the behaviors and expressed thought processes of an individual, the more complexity you will find). I further propose that any sufficiently complex system will demonstrate 'bent' behaviors over even very short sampling periods.

        In other words, finding a unbent psych student or one unaffected by bent people is like finding a meteorology student uninterested in or unaffected by weather. Of course, in the context of this conversation this cannot be proved except by induction, because it is difficult to sample twice the number of people on earth without waiting an inconveniently long time.

[reply]
      Good answer and your thought processes well explained.
[reply]

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