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Re: [Phys-L] einstein --> misattribution in general --> appeal to authority in general



John,
- You are leaving out the heartache of having a mentally ill son and how
that might lead to a not completely scientific, off-the cuff remark.
- I have read 34 books on mental illness, and my1000-word reviews of 3 of
them can be found among a short collection, at Amazon.com by googling <
amazon norwood reviews >. The only reason to go there is to see that I have
looked into mental illness, and I doubt that anything there specifically
applies to subtopics at hand.
Bill Norwood



On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 4:05 PM, John Denker <jsd@av8n.com> wrote:

On 07/21/2014 12:29 PM, Bill Norwood wrote:
- Oops, but Einstein could have had special insight into insanity.
- His son was mentally ill and was cared for in England, and Albert
Einstein rarely or never visited. Am I getting this right?

1) Anybody with any insight into mental illness would know that
repetition is not the same as perseveration, stereotypy, or
obsession/compulsion.

Even if it were the same, or even close, it would be at most
a symptom, not even a particularly common symptom, certainly
not the /definition/ of mental illness.

2) Anybody with any insight into physics or probability would
know that repeated sampling of the same probability distribution,
in hopes of finding a low-probability high-payoff event, is not
the least bit insane. In fact a great deal of good research
fits in this category.

This is not restricted to laboratory science. Virtually all
of the minerals industry depends on finding a vein that is
many, many, many standard deviations richer than the "average"
distribution. Prospecting and wildcatting are risky, but not
insane.

A good scientist -- or prospector -- is an expert at managing
risk.

There is an extensive literature on fat tails, et cetera --
going back to the earliest days of probability theory (1656).
The idea of a "black swan" event goes back more than 2000 years.

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