It will be cold in the winter and hot in the summer. You may be surprised to know that I really don’t have to know the spin state of every atom in my front yard to make useful predictions. Resorting to overly strict definitions (defining your way to success) does not impress me. For many engineering problems an approximate answer is totally acceptable. You many be correct in some idealistic way, us engineering folk will ignore you and go on making stuff that just works.
BTW: I work with metrology as part of my job, determine the air pressure and temperature to a part in a thousand is actually a moderately difficult measurement for the here and now, much less for any point in the past or future.
So would your answer to the question in the OP be that NOTHING could be done to address the pandemic if you were to find yourself in possession of Time Binoculars? Or are you simply stating that the whole discussion is pointless because such a thing could never exist? It is just a thought experiment after all…
This is nearly the same topic as speculating on the powers of a super AI. If you imagine for a moment an AI that taps into a vast amount of data (past and present) and applies sophisticated algorithms to that data then it could make probabilistic predictions, within the limits of known science.
Your ‘time binoculars’ show a blend of possible futures, and how likely each is to come about. You won’t know the exact share price of MSFT for tomorrow, but you will know better than anyone else whether to buy or sell. You will make better bets on the horses and be insanely profitable at poker, without ever knowing which card is coming next.
I live in Melbourne Australia and we know exactly how to beat the pandemic. The science we have is good enough, if you believe it. It’s still hard to believe any AI can predict human stupidity, but I guess we’re just complicated chaotic systems too.
Of course, it helps to be in the southern hemisphere this time of year
But yeh, the US has made a lot of mistakes that didn’t require the ability to look into the future to avoid. In particular policies in the north-east in places like NY and NJ impacting the elderly population.
You are absolutely correct, in fact you agree with me. Hard science tells us that the chaotic/quantum nature of the present allows only probabilistic predictions of the future, and for many useful cases that’s just fine. Engineering depends on ‘good enough’ measurements. Weather forecasting relies on ‘good enough’ predictions. That’s what I’ve been saying, consistently, repeatedly.
But to propose ‘time binoculars’ that would see (for example) the results of a horse race next year is not science, it’s science fiction. That’s what I’m arguing against.
It is a thought experiment, not a proposal for a technology. Given the (presumably impossible) ability to see into the future, what would you do to address the pandemic? By making an absurd initial assumption, what does that tell you about models that you have formed? The community lounge is a place where we can have unusual off-topic discussions like this. You can mute the category if these sorts of discussions are too silly for you.
That’s half the fun with Monte Carlo approaches… it allows you to explore the absurd as well as the possible, and in exploring those absurd to potentially real occurrences, we gain insight and feedback into our own understanding.
