> > Miles Jackson wrote:
> > Good point. However, I was thinking of psychology and sociology (fields
> > I'm most familiar with). You should watch clinical psychologists who
> > have no interest and little capacity in math bullshit about "chaos
> > theory". Truly painful.
>
> It seems that one can meaningfully allude to chaos theory without knowing a
> whole lot about it. The fact that a large number of variables can preclude
> the possibility of accurate prediction is important.
Luke, that's not chaos theory. Chaos theory is concerned with looking quantitatively and deterministically at nonlinear systems that display extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. So actually chaos theory *allows* us to calculate results of what otherwise might have been impossible problems, using things like self-similarity and attractors.
I think the concept of attractors was discussed on this list some time last year, and I gave a short little intro to the concept of attractors in chaos theory.
Chaos theory is most popularly misconceptualized like this - that it has been proven that some things are unpredictable. It is almost as often misconceptualized to mean that all randomness has order. Neither is really true. This phenomenon is similar to the way many assert that "Einstein proved everything is relative", which he certainly did not.
Matt
-- Matt Cramer <cramer at voicenet.com> http://www.voicenet.com/~cramer/ PGP RSA Key ID: 0x1F6A4471 aim: beyondzero123 PGP DH/DSS Key ID: 0xAFF35DF2 icq: 120941588
yahoo msg: beyondzero123 Trillian did a little research in the ship's copy of THHGTTG. It had some advice to offer on drunkenness. "Go to it", it said, "and good luck." It was cross-referenced to the entry concerning the size of the Universe and ways of coping with that.
-THHGTTG