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May I Take Your Order? January 16, 2007

Posted by ocmpoma in : supernaturalism , trackback

Over in the forums, there was a… I hesitate to call it a discussion, let alone a debate. Let’s say that someone made a point, which has been responded to, that order was good evidence, constituting perhaps even proof, of the existence of a god.

Now, as one can see on the Bibliofile page, I’m currently reading The Origin of Wealth, by Eric Beinhocker. Beinhocker, while talking about thermodynamics in relation to economics, makes a point that anyone discussing order as evidence of anything should keep in mind: “What constitutes order versus disorder must be measured relative to something.”

Now, this was hinted at in the aforementioned… discussion on the forums, but I felt the Beinhocker said it well enough that he deserved to be quoted regarding it. There’s more, too, about the “shuffling trick” of Polish physicist Wojciech Zureck:

A magician shows you a deck of cards; the deck is perfectly ordered by value and suit… The magician then shuffles the deck very thoroughly, completely randomizing it. Next he hands you a deck of cards, and bets you twenty dollars that you cannot do what he just did… you… accept the bet and give the neatly ordered deck a really good shuffling until it looks nice and random… But then [the magician] says, “You lost the bet. In my shuffled deck, the order was queen of spades, ten of clubs, four of diamonds, and so on. Your deck looks nothing like mine…” The point of the parable is that any one configuration of the deck is just as likely or unlikely as any other… We merely have picked one particular configuration… and called it “ordered” becuase of the arbitrary meaning of the set of symbols printed on the cards.

Now, the same someone who mentioned order later clarified by mentioning “predictability” — more on that later.

Note: the passages from the text are on page 308 of my 2006 Harvard Business School Press edition.

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