Can some people intuitively find order in chaos?

March 7, 2002 3:38 AM

Can some people intuitively find order in chaos? Scientists discover that certain people are likely to predict chaotic time series, such as the weather or the stock market.
posted by costas (13 comments total)

But not women.
posted by aaronshaf at 4:41 AM on March 7, 2002

I meant, men can't figure out women. At least, I can't.
posted by aaronshaf at 4:50 AM on March 7, 2002

Sure they can! In fact, a substantial percentage of women just knew a guy was going to say something like that, aaronshaf.
posted by allaboutgeorge at 4:50 AM on March 7, 2002

And that is predicting chaotic time series, such as the weather or the stock market--or shooting fish in a barrel?

On topic: very interesting. But does another percentage of the population have this gift in reverse? Just wonderin'...
posted by y2karl at 6:51 AM on March 7, 2002

On topic: very interesting. But does another percentage of the population have this gift in reverse? Just wonderin'...
Create chaos in order? Doesn't that happen a lot around here? :)
posted by riffola at 7:03 AM on March 7, 2002

mitsu wrote about "implicit learning" (dec. 24) a couple years back:

Studies have shown that people can learn tasks without having explicit knowledge of what it is they have learned. For example, in one well-known case, people were shown a sequence of lights and asked to try to anticipate which would light up next. Unknown to the participants, there was a complex, semi-random pattern to the lights. When interviewed, the participants expressed no conscious knowledge of any pattern, yet over time they nevertheless got better at predicting the sequence. They claimed that after a while they would get a "feel" for the machine, even though they were unable to express exactly what that was.

it kinda reminds me of the work roger nelson does at princeton engineering anomalies research! and i guess, if you really want to stretch it, you could tie it in with david deutsch's notion that "[q]uantum computers share information with huge numbers of versions of themselves throughout the multiverse," and stuart hameroff's idea that indeed our brains are (among other things) quantum computers, which btw is the basis for consciousness :)
posted by kliuless at 7:14 AM on March 7, 2002

Laney?
posted by antimony at 7:16 AM on March 7, 2002

Gotta look for the nodal points, man.
posted by Foosnark at 8:47 AM on March 7, 2002

The volunteers were told that the numbers were maximum temperatures for the previous eight days. In fact the numbers were computer-generated: some sets were part of a chaotic series while the rest were random.

The abstract is online, but the full article costs $21.50. No thanks.

I don't buy it. Even with all the number-crunching in the world, you're going to be hard-pressed to tell the difference between chaotic and random with only eight samples. Nor can you generalize from the deterministic Hénon map that the experiment used, to non-deterministic phenomenon like the stock market and the weather. That part is just sensationalist pseudo-journalism from New Scientist.
posted by anewc2 at 10:32 AM on March 7, 2002

this is the only link I can find to the Patternists faction in Bruce Sterlings Shaper/Mech world. But its a pretty good link.
posted by darkpony at 10:46 AM on March 7, 2002

also i was reminded of this missingmatter post from awhile back:

"An NEC Study finds that market games on the web can forecast future events, ranging from oscar winners to the discovery of sub-atomic particles. The researchers analyzed such sites as the Foresight Exchange (FX), a market on the Web where players bet (in phony FX dollars) on unresolved questions of scientific and societal interest, and the Hollywood exchange (HSX), where traders bet virtual money on who will win the Oscars. They conclude "People can look with some confidence to existing market games like HSX and FX for evidence of future trends..."

took forever to find :) but i think it illustrates that even if individually we're not able to find patterns amidst the void nor define the trail of path dependence through the mists of time nor even discern those blurred and cloudy doors of perception down the long monty hall, collectively we may be able to do so!
posted by kliuless at 12:51 PM on March 7, 2002

If you want to understand women, I'd suggest having sex with men.
posted by Settle at 3:36 PM on March 7, 2002

If you want to understand women, I'd suggest having sex with men.

Can I just save time and do it with myself instead?
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:51 PM on March 7, 2002