The Watchmaker Choplogic

The watchmaker analogy consists of the comparison of some natural phenomenon to a watch.  Typically, the analogy is presented as a prelude to the teleological argument and improbability.  This is generally presented like this:

• The complex inner workings of a watch necessitate an intelligent designer.  No one could expect by putting all the components of a watch in a sealed black box and shake it for even a very long period of time, a workable watch could be developed.
• As with a watch, the complexity of X (a particular organ or organism, the structure of the solar system, life, the entire universe) necessitates a designer because it is very improbable that complex structures could be developed just by some simple physics in our universe.

But this argument of improbability and teleological is very often deviated from the fact.  It is similar to what most people would expect the chance should be less than 10% in a group of randomly selected students, say 30, with 2 of them were born on the same day of the year.  Perhaps, in human brains, there are some kind of misfired mechanisms always make us underestimate the probability of something that could be happened without our interference.

Here is a simple analogy trying to show people who still believe in the Watchmaker argument, how wrong they could be.  The analogue card game is like this:

In one shot of cards (52) , each time send 1 out to the table until it get to 13.  Then whenever 1 card is sent to the table, 1 card should be taken away at random from the cards on the table.  The question is:  What is the probability (after the 52 cards are all sent out to the table and 39 cards are taken away randomly) to get a full house (13 cards with the same suit) on the table eventually?

The calculation should be somewhat as below:

or

 
Both equations give out the same result.  The chance of the result (i.e. after sending out the 52 cards, the remained 13 cards are all in the same suit) is pretty small, around 6.3 E-12 (that is less than 0.000000001%).   If this has to be happened by random, it could be said very very improbable. 

Nonetheless, if a very simple selection rule is applied (no need of a designer to design this rule, no need a guardian to monitor the process throughout or to change the rule to achieve the result) the chance of getting this result (i.e. after sending out the 52 cards, the remained 13 cards are all in the same suit) could be increased tremendously.  And perhaps, "tremendously" is even not the right word to describe this.

The simple rule is: preserve the card with the same suit and reject cards with different suits whenever a new card is sent out to the table. 

With this simple rule in place, the chance of achieving a full house after finishing all the 52 cards becomes 100%.  That is to say,  this is for certain there will be a full house on the table before or when the 52 cards finished.  The improvement of the chance is from 0.000000001% to 100% certainty this will be achieved.  That is why the adjective "tremendously" seems a bit weak in this case to describe the betterment.

This calculation answers the Watchmaker choplogic is in fact a fallacy.  No matter how improbable it may seem that a watch could be developed with all the components in place by shaking it in a black box even for million of years, just with a little simple rule of selection, the situation turns 180 degree.  And this is how natural selection works.  The selection criterion (only cards with the same suit remain) could be a very good analogy to kin selection or species with similar characteristics which have the best survival rate in a particular environment. 

Back to the question about birthday mentioned in the beginning of this article.  Many things appear to be very improbable in the first sight and are found that the probability is in fact very high either by mathematical modeling or by experiments.  The answer may surprise for those who did not meet the question before.  Because the answer is over 50% chance, in fact it is over 70% chance there will be 2 people have birthdays on the same day of the year in a group of 30 randomly selected person.  The calculation is as below:

After all, the watch analogy does not function as a premise to an argument — rather it functions as a rhetorical device and a preamble. Its purpose is to establish the plausibility of the general premise: you can tell, simply by looking at something, whether or not it was the product of intelligent design.

In most formulations of the argument, the characteristic that indicates intelligent design is left implicit. In some formulations, the characteristic is orderliness or complexity (which is a form of order). In other cases it is clearly being designed for a purpose, where "clearly" is usually left undefined.

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Ten Commandments

The New 10 Commandments:

1. In all things, strive to cause no harm and suffering.
2. Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you.
3. Treat your fellow human beings, your fellow living things, and the world in general with love, honesty, faithfulness and respect.
4. Do not overlook evil or shrink from administering justice, but always be ready to forgive wrongdoing freely admitted and honestly regretted.
5. Live life with a sense of joy and wonder.
6. Always seek to be learning something new.
7. Test all things; always check your ideas against the facts, and be ready to discard even a cherished belief if it does not conform to them.
8. Never seek to censor or cut yourself off from dissent; always respect the right of others to disagree with you.
9. Form independent opinions on the basis of your own reason and experience; do not allow yourself to be led blindly by others.
10. Question everything.

No matter how nicely the original 10 Commandments be put, such as this nice little song above, the commandments are nothing more than a cruel and naive tribal rules.  They are also addressed to a group that has been promised the land and flocks of other people: the Amalekites and Midianites and others whom God orders them to kill, rape, enslave, or exterminate.

If we still believe these are the most important rules of human society and blindly following them, this is certainly a disgrace of the human race. 

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Wine and Sewage Law

Conventional wisdom says groups are powerful. Group dynamics are powerful. And so groups dominate individuals, not the other way around. There was tons of research, going back decades, demonstrating that people conform to group values and norms.

A recent episode of This American Life interviewed Will Felps, a professor who conducted a sociological experiment demonstrating the surprisingly powerful effect of bad apples.  Seems peer effect only has the power towards the dark side.  The experiment is as below:

Groups of four college students were organized into teams and given a task to complete some basic management decisions in 45 minutes. To motivate the teams, they're told that whichever team performs best will be awarded $100 per person. What they don't know, however, is that in some of the groups, the fourth member of their team isn't a student. He's an actor hired to play a bad apple, one of these personality types:

1. The Depressive Pessimist will complain that the task that they're doing isn't enjoyable, and make statements doubting the group's ability to succeed.
2. The Jerk will say that other people's ideas are not adequate, but will offer no alternatives himself. He'll say "you guys need to listen to the expert: me."
3. The Slacker will say "whatever", and "I really don't care."

And Will found something different.

Invariably, groups that had the bad apple would perform worse. And this despite the fact that were people in some groups that were very talented, very smart, very likeable. Felps found that the bad apple's behavior had a profound effect -- groups with bad apples performed 30 to 40 percent worse than other groups. On teams with the bad apple, people would argue and fight, they didn't share relevant information, they communicated less.

Even worse, other team members began to take on the bad apple's characteristics. When the bad apple was a jerk, other team members would begin acting like a jerk. When he was a slacker, they began to slack, too. And they wouldn't act this way just in response to the bad apple. They would act this way to each other, in sort of a spillover effect.

What they found, in short, is that the worst team member is the best predictor of how any team performs. It doesn't seem to matter how great the best member is, or what the average member of the group is like. It all comes down to what your worst team member is like. The teams with the worst person performed the poorest.

While it's depressing to learn that a group can be so powerfully affected by the worst tendencies of a single member, it's heartening to know that a skilled leader, if you're lucky enough to have one, can intervene and potentially control the situation.

Still, the obvious solution is to address the problem at its source: get rid of the bad apple.  Or perhaps the other way around:

Wine and Sewage Law:  

Dropping a piece of drink into dirty water, you would get a bottle of dirty water; while dropping a spoonful of dirty water into a bottle of wine, you still would get a bottle of dirty water.

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How to dance …..

Dancing ...... is a vertical expression of a horizontal wish. 

You have to hold her like the skin on her thigh.
And she is your reason for living. 
Let her go like your heart is being ripped from your chest. 
Pull her back like you are gonna have your way with her,
right here on the dance floor. 
And then finish ......

Like she has ruined you for life.

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