where the logick stumbleth, the spirit shall not rein
the passage below is taken verbatim from a serious contemporary advanced statistics textbook, written by a serious advanced statistics professor, having some serious statistical achievements:
"if you want to predict where in the night sky the planets will be, you can actually do very well with a model where the Earth is at the center of the universe, and the Sun and everything else revolve around it. You can even estimate, from data, how fast Mars (for example) goes around the Earth, or where, in this model, it should be tonight. But, since the Earth is not at the center of the solar system, those parameters don’t actually refer to anything in reality. They are just mathematical fictions. On the other hand, we can also predict where the planets will appear in the sky using models where all the planets orbit the Sun, and the parameters of the orbit of Mars in that model do refer to reality [We can be pretty sure of this, because we use our parameter estimates to send our robots to Mars, and they get there]."
this kinda makes me take back all the praise that i granted to this (seemingly) sublime discipline, or at least put it on ice. but hopefully this one is an innocent lamb, an outlier perhaps?
"if you want to predict where in the night sky the planets will be, you can actually do very well with a model where the Earth is at the center of the universe, and the Sun and everything else revolve around it. You can even estimate, from data, how fast Mars (for example) goes around the Earth, or where, in this model, it should be tonight. But, since the Earth is not at the center of the solar system, those parameters don’t actually refer to anything in reality. They are just mathematical fictions. On the other hand, we can also predict where the planets will appear in the sky using models where all the planets orbit the Sun, and the parameters of the orbit of Mars in that model do refer to reality [We can be pretty sure of this, because we use our parameter estimates to send our robots to Mars, and they get there]."
this kinda makes me take back all the praise that i granted to this (seemingly) sublime discipline, or at least put it on ice. but hopefully this one is an innocent lamb, an outlier perhaps?