Footnote Physicist

          “There are no solutions, there are only trade-offs.”           – Thomas Sowell I           “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”           – Christopher Hitchens II           “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”           – Pierre Simon Laplace (as paraphrased by Carl Sagan) III           Baselines (or base-rates ) are an acknowledgment of the fact that, totally aside from a given intervention, many effects are occurring in some normal rate all of the time.  Imagine, for example, that you give drug x to 10,000 people for a period of a year in order to figure out if it is dangerous.  Then imagine that 10 people in the study died.  One might be tempted to worry that the drug has a ...

          “An intelligence that, at a given instance, could comprehend all the forces by which nature is            animated and the respective situation of the beings that make it up, if moreover it were vast            enough to submit these data to analysis, would encompass in the same formula the movements of            the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atoms.  For such an intelligence           nothing would be uncertain, and the future, like the past, would be open to its eyes.”           – Pierre-Simon de Laplace I           “God does not play dice.”           – Albert Einstein II           Determinism  is a facet of  mechanical philosophy  all too oft...