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04/06/2018

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David Duffy

Anachronistically, one answer is 20th century statistical reasoning.

"As [R.A.] Fisher put it, we should think of experiments as contests with a particularly perverse devil:

To play this game with the greatest chance of success, the experimenter cannot afford to exclude the possibility of any possible arrangement of soil fertilities, and his best strategy is to equalize the chance that any treatment shall fall on any plot by determining it by chance himself. Then if all the plots with a particular treatment have higher yields, it may still be due to the devil’s arrangement, but then and only then will the experimenter know how often his chance arrangement will coincide with the devil’s." And why "superdeterminism" as a solution to QM puzzles is so disturbing.

Eric Schliesser

Hi David,
Fisher's idea -- and the very notion that statistical reasoning can be brought to bear in such a way on either Posidonian style considerations and the PSR -- goes back to the eighteenth century (with D'Álembert and Laplace playing an important role; about that some other time).

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