4merper4mer

@LeGOATski down thread a few posts you linked a study and eventually asked me what I thought of it and/or to disprove it. I told you I had essentially already done that and you could scroll up a bit. For unknown reasons, you didn’t bother. Perhaps it was to avoid wear and tear on your scrolling finger so here is your silver platter. After you read this and before you reflexively post that either I didn’t refute your study or refuted it poorly please stop and think for a minute. Just give it a minute but actually think with logic, not alien wishfulness. If you still feel the same way, please explain why. The portion below is unedited from Feb 13. I appreciate you refraining from calling me a troll for irrational reasons as others have. It’s like I took their lollipop because I don’t agree with their illogical conclusions that sound like a stoner saying whoa dude what if blue was really red and red was really blue. Augie is an exception to this but sells short what we actually do know about the universe and life, which while incomplete, is considerable. I have explained many mathematical facets within this thread which lead to and overwhelming set of odds that intelligent communicative life beyond Earth is extraordinarily unlikely to the point of being beyond our comprehension. The counter has consistently been the “argument” based on the sitcom math known as the Drake equation pointing out that many stars exist. Now a new twist is that we’ll someday be exploring beyond the observable universe because some appear to be coming to grips with the notion that the observable universe, while immense, isn’t big enough. I won’t review everything in this reply but I will highlight a few in appreciation of your thoughtful post. They are not meant to be seen as proof of anything on their own, but they do add up. There are many. I’ll use just two. 1. Factorials and large numbers. You may have heard the at first unbelievable fact that it is highly unlikely that in the history of the world two decks of playing cards have EVER been shuffled in the same sequence. There is stuff about this all over the internet, feel free to look it up. The number of ways a deck can be shuffled is 52! Which which 52*51*50………*3*2*1. At first blush everyone realizes that produces a large number, but the true scope is hard to grasp. One Illustration I still find astonishing is that there are more ways to shuffle a decks of cards than there are ATOMS on planet Earth. Amazing right? Well, when you look at something called the Rubisco function, it connects amino acids in a way that enable photosynthesis. For this to happen, sequencing of the acids, and the way they fold together, as far as is known to us, have to happen in ONE specific way from a number of possibilities that far exceeds 52!. No one knows the exact number of possibilities but it is something along the lines of 250! or more. That is a number that is beyond inconceivable. I posted a video about this not very far up this thread. That is one component of real math that no one refuted beyond calling me a troll because they reeeeeeeeeeally are hoping for aliens. The Emperor’s New Clothes in a nutshell. 2. Von Neumann probes. Mathematician John von Neumann understood a lot more about math than anyone on this board as well as anyone named Sheldon on any sitcom ever made. At one point, in a Fermi paradox sort of way, he observed that despite the difficulties of living intelligent beings traveling through space, an intelligent society or even an intelligent individual could design and deploy self replicating robots capable of surveying the entirety of a galaxy the size of ours in an expedition that would take roughly 250k years. We are arguably 50-ish years away from being able to create this ourselves. The Earth is 4 billion years old. The universe, roughly 14. If life were so prevalent, why no VN probes, ever? There are many more factors that point away from, not toward life. The rare Earth hypothesis, the prevalence of flare prone red giants, quasars rendering entire galaxies lifeless, detection of exactly zero evidence of alien signals or signatures during our admittedly brief era of space exploration and on and on. I just chose two of my favorites for this post. I think what this boils down to is humans inability to understand large numbers. The people who want aliens to be there inevitably point at the imperceptibly high number of stars and make assumptions from there. But that is only the beginnings of a numerator. The denominator, as we learn more and more, gets inconceivably higher. It would be easier to understand if each number got a lot lower. If I were to play a shell game with you and there were a thousand shells, then asked you to lift one…..there is a pea under it. Would you assume there were more peas under some of the remaining 999? Probably. Then if I told you that the pea had spontaneously spawned and that the odds of a pea being under any given shell were 500 trillion to one, would you still think one of the 999 shells MUST have a pea under it? In this thread no one has come to grips with that………math. Just the Sheldon stuff.

Do you recall what our defense was like right before Rex got here? How about right after? His defense is made for the early 90s and given the changes in the NFL it is more out of date than the average Betamax player.

Get Reggie Ragland on the speed dial.

Nice theory. Knox getting dumped too? Davis? Bass? Elam?

Make up call DPI would be the right thing to do.

All signs point to yes.

Uncalled for name calling. I disagree with people here but it is not personal.

If one side of a discussion takes hundreds of factors into account and another takes 6 or 7 and purposely ignores contradicting info, one is superior. Superior does not mean perfect…but still superior.

Actual math > Sitcom math

That was true, but we put on some glasses and we see better now. Unfortunately, the speed of light is still a thing so I blame the photons. Dude, if you don’t understand why the observable universe is the observable universe, then we are at a standstill. It’s called the observable universe for a very good reason. It isn’t called the permanently observable universe, but it would be difficult to find a scientist that thinks the condition is temporary. On a side note, I’m wondering if I should interpret your fixation on the unobservable universe as a capitulation that math has indeed shown the observable universe to be devoid of intelligent life outside of Earth. Please do get back to me on that.

Do you understand WHY the observable universe is the observable universe?

Vegas not up to date on how incredibly horrible Beane’s drafts have been?

Unless something drastically changes in either physics or our ability to control it, I think it is reasonable to limit discussion/speculation to the observable universe. Agree?

Score more points then the other team does what? I can’t take the suspense.

I know the Bills can’t be in on him and I haven’t seen them play enough to have an opinion on whether he will earn the big contract he’ll get but i have seen enough to say he is faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar better than Clowney.

Ok list a team or two’s drafts from top to bottom…..not cherry picked and display Beane’s deficiencies. It ought to be easy for you. Also, where does “top flight” end? Top 10, 5, 3, only 1?

Especially in cheesy movies. Which provides a clue displaying that life does not exist elsewhere.

Do we know that decks of cards can be shuffled in different ways? Yup. Why? Because we’ve seen it. Do we know that proteins can fold in different ways? Yup for the same reason. It may or may not be random….impossible to tell because there are too many possibilities to count, but we do know there are an inconceivable amount of ways it CAN happen and that we’re only aware of one that fosters life. Obviously life is possible because it exists here. It is becoming inescapable that the odds of it happening on a given planet are 1/x where x is a number far far greater than the number of planets in the universe. That might not be the answer we’d hope for, but it is the answer.

No I’m not. He took a shot, it flopped. The potential payoff was big this year. The cost was sustainability moving forward. The point is that Beane’s mythological ineptitude at drafting is not the issue others will make it out to be. What cost us most was the failed Miller gamble. On what planet is a 10-7 record an indicator of a bad team….in any sport? If you’re going to claim the Ravens and Steelers are better at drafting than the Bills overall then make your case without cherry picking one or two guys. If your going to claim Beane is bad at drafting, repeat the excercise with at least 15 teams.

But we do know there are trillions upon trillions upon trillions of ways they can fold and yet only one of those formed life. You can twist as increasing the odds aliens exist but in fact, it makes it far far far less likely. Math.

We’re there any other players on the team drafted in the same year that might have taken precedence over Edmunds and altered the equation a bit? Why did you seem so definitive in your first post only to use phrases like “seems like” now?

This is what I’m talking about. Cherry picking things and calling them failures. He’s had some hits? You mean like 3 straight division titles? But the standard is now every third round pick has to be an immediate superstar? You’re not going to get every pick perfect and the guys you list are mostly still young. Miller was a calculated risk, but a risk nonetheless. Beane might do it again given the same circumstances. Heck, I might. But there is no denying that it created more holes than a perceived “miss” on Bernard.

My post was not to say it was a bad move or to say “I told you so” about Miller in any way. It was to say that the move for Miller came with a cost. That cost has created holes that need to be filled. There are people all over this board saying Beane has drafted poorly which is simply not true. Poorly would imply worse than at least 16 other teams. Has anyone even attempted to make that case? No. They cherry pick how we could have had DK Metclaf or other stupid anecdotal stuff. The Miller move could have resulted in a Super Bowl championship this weekend. It didn’t. It resulted in a video with stuff burning, a bunch of roster holes, and an injury. Now, if Beane doesn’t fill all of those holes it will just “prove” that he is bad at drafting to some here. That’s dumb.

Anyone ever read about how 52 factorial is such a big number that it’s likely that no two card deck shuffles in history have resulted in the same sequence of cards? It’s fascinating and interesting and a fun read if you have the time. Its also “amateur” when compared to the topic below. But, but but….there are more stars than grains of sand. More math:

He made a really good play and helped us win a big game. Was that worth the cost to you? If so, congrats, you win. Well that’s a difficult question and pretty complex. What it doesn’t contain is an expectation to get hall of famers with every pick or be able to pick guys at 27 that were actually drafted at 4. It also doesn’t include expectations that all players we pass over will become abject failures.