Archive for October 27th, 2004

The Magic of Mathematics

Posted by Bob in How Things Work on 10/27/2004

“One test is worth a hundred expert opinions.”

That is the basis of Western science.

Every other society depends on absolutely nothing but “expert opinions.”

Aristotle said that men had one more tooth than women did, and every “intellectual” believed it for two thousand years.

If a man did not have one more tooth than a woman, why would Aristotle have said it?

If you counted teeth and found that women had the same number of teeth as men, intellectuals would patiently explain to you that the man’s extra tooth fell out.

But today you could make a valid statistical study and PROVE that, from your one thousand samples, the odds are a billion to one that Aristotle was wrong.

The developement of Western science is a slow movement from Oriental Wisdom to simple arithmetic. In fact, the actual science of statistics was first developed just over a century ago.

But long before statistics was developed in modern terms, the West had learned that if you actually COUNT and TEST, the words of some fat Great Philosopher sitting there babbling while children starve around him don’t mean a damned thing.

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