The World is Built on Probability (1984)

https://archive.org/details/lev-tarasov-the-world-is-built-on-probability-mir-2023

by the-mitr • 3 years ago

291 91 3 years ago

archive.org

ark4579• 3 years ago

hmm probably

contravariant2• 3 years ago

Probability theory works, with 100% chance even. Which annoyingly isn't the same as always.

quantum_state• 3 years ago

The concept of probability is based on the concept of measure in math => limitation in its description of things, e.g., the probability for a real number in [0, 1) being an irrational number is 1.

bmacho2• 3 years ago

What is funny thought, that 0% chance events don't can't happen, but must happen. Like when you pick a point on a line, or roll a dice infinitely many times.

throwme_123• 3 years ago

HMMs are probabilistic models, yes.

ouija• 3 years ago

Seems like a lot of effort went into typesetting this, wow!

I can recommend "Calculus: Basic Concepts for High Schools" by the same author (L.V. Tarasov) to anybody unfamiliar with calculus: https://archive.org/details/TarasovCalculus/page/n1/mode/2up. It's written as a dialogue between author and reader.

the-mitr3• 3 years ago

Thanks for linking Calculus book.

His book on school physics also use the dialogue approach:

Questions and Answers in School Physics (Dialogues between students and teacher)

https://archive.org/details/questions-and-answers-in-school-...

While other two books use dialogues intermittently as in the probability book

Basics Concepts of Quantum Mechanics

https://archive.org/details/tarasov-basic-concepts-of-quantu...

This Amazingly Symmetrical World

https://archive.org/details/TarasovThisAmazinglySymmetricalW...

(I am the curator/maintainer of the mirtitles.org blog and the typesetter of the books)

FollowingTheDao13• 3 years ago

Learning calculus in high school made me question everything. You can never measure anything, never mind the area of a circe using calculus. It will only ever be a "good enough" measurement.

There is a point where all of you will finally come to appreciate the limits of rationalism and materialism and let go a bit more.

hgsgm6• 3 years ago

You seem to have misunderstood the essence of calculus. Calculus provides efficient, high quality estimates for messy real world phenomena.

Calculus put a man on the moon and a camera next to Pluto.

zelphirkalt• 3 years ago

It is not really about measuring things, but about reaching a definitive answer given some assumptions. Sometimes our notation of numbers get in the way of writing things shortly (instead of infinite decimal places), other times we can use a fraction and be exact on the paper we write on.

tharkun__• 3 years ago

This seems to have the hallmarks of LaTeX, meaning: not as much time sunk into "typesetting" as you might think ;)

hgsgm6• 3 years ago

It's not polite to accuse people of not reading the article, but

This completely digital version typeset in using TEX with EB Garamond font by DAMITR MAZANAV damitr@proton.me
Released on the web by http://mirtitles.org in 2023.
Access the BTEX project files http://gitlab.com/mirtitles/twibop

a_w• 3 years ago

https://mirtitles.org/2018/09/04/calculus-basic-concepts-for...

https://archive.org/details/LevTarasovCalculusBasicConceptsF...

goatlover2• 3 years ago

The wavefunction is deterministic. If you take the MWI as the most straight forward interpretation of the math, then the universe if fundamentally deterministic. Probability on a physics level would represent our ignorance of the other branches.

golol2• 3 years ago

I don't think you can reason like this. As far as I understodod, standard quantum mechanics does not make any statement about how the measuring process and the collapse of the wavefunvtion happens. So while the waveform evolves deterministically, you can only ever apply this model when you are in the position of performing measurements on some quantum mechanical system. As I understand, Quantum mechanics is not meant to also model you together with the experiment as a wavefunction, because the act of you performing a measurement does not have a definition in the form of the wavefunction interacting with itself somehow. So without extensions to QM, you should not reason with universal deterministic waveforms.

canjobear• 3 years ago

the act of you performing a measurement does not have a definition in the form of the wavefunction interacting with itself somehow

Performing a measurement just means you become entangled with the thing you’re measuring.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence

goatlover2• 3 years ago

The argument is that the experimental device and you are made up of the same quantum stuff that you're measuring, so there's no reason to suppose a collapse of the wavefunction or that the wavefunction doesn't apply to the entire experimental setup. Just saying if MWI is the correct interpretation.

williamcotton• 3 years ago

Simplicity of mathematical models at the expense of falsification… who needs science, anyways?

layer84• 3 years ago

Or it would characterize the futures of the current branch.

kubanczyk• 3 years ago

then the universe if fundamentally deterministic

s/universe/multiverse/

And a universe is fundamentally probabilistic.

jounker• 3 years ago

What i remember from my PDE class was a lecture which involved solving the wave equation for a particular bounded case and, with a slight transformation, the professor showing that the normal distribution was embedded in that solution.

andrewgleave• 3 years ago

David Deutsch’s “Physics Without Probability” covers the history of probability, it’s legitimate and misconceived uses and concludes that according to MWI there is no such thing in reality - it’s basically that probabilities correspond to how measures of the multiverse proportion themselves as differentiation occurs.

I watched it a few years ago so may be misremembering bits but I think that is the gist…

Worth a watch especially if you balk at this idea just to to see a strong counter argument.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wfzSE4Hoxbc&t=0s

Edit: link

hgsgm6• 3 years ago

There is no contradiction. In Many Worlds Interprepation, Each World (and mostly importantly, with relative weight = 1, the World I am in right now) is built on probabilities.

NeutralForest• 3 years ago

The book looks absolutely beautiful

FollowingTheDao13• 3 years ago

My Hypothesis: All matter exists in a sphere of probability. Our brains are masters of computing probabilities to tell us the most likely location for any object. It is not that we collapse the wave form, but that our brain ignores the wave form for our convenience.

Light is always a wave, never a particle. And a wave is just a probability.

pharmakom2• 3 years ago

Our brains would then exist in a state of probability too.

FollowingTheDao13• 3 years ago

Yes, they do. But our minds do not. The brain creates the mind, the ego, and this is another collapse of a wave form.

imdoor2• 3 years ago

Do you account for the fact that probability distributions can have multiple peaks with equal probability? If multiple brains were involved, they'd somehow have to coordinate on what they deem the most likely outcome.

FollowingTheDao13• 3 years ago

Our brains all use the program, but we can see when some of these programs have a glitch. Take some LSD and you will see what I mean.

probability distributions can have multiple peaks with equal probability?

I think I know where you are going, but can you be more clear so I do not confuse things with my assumptions?

Eupraxias2• 3 years ago

We need to connect - we are of the same mind. How do we do that? I have composed a 'book' on the topic and would love your thoughts.

FollowingTheDao13• 3 years ago

awesome!

followingdao@protonmail.com

KRAKRISMOTT• 3 years ago

No mention of Metropolis-Hastings :(

It's the biggest, baddest, hammer in probabilistic machine learning.

rajekas• 3 years ago

Not about this book in particular, but I wanted to thank you for creating this amazing resource. As someone who obsessively bought every MIR title he could while growing up in Delhi, do take a bow.

cuttothechase• 3 years ago

MIR publishers (Moscow) published so many high quality books. They even had the same elegant style, quality and accessibility even in their translated works.

The quality of paper used, the typesetting, the cloth binding and in general the physical attributes of their books were a work of art in itself. One can easily fall in love with the physical book just for the way it was designed, let alone the content.

The authors used in their translated works were equally exceptional in their translation.

I fondly remember reading their "Physics for entertainment" by Perelman as a translated work in good old days and it actually made me fall in love with the text book physics taught at the school level.

Given that this was an artifact when USSR made it even more fascinating. Books were priced a trifle over the shipping cost as they were likely subsidized heavily by the government.

It is sad to see that they are no more. They were likely defunded/dissolved when USSR broke up.

Thank you MIR for lighting up my childhood.

RIP.

- https://mirtitles.org/

- https://mirtitles.org/2012/04/30/misha/

themodelplumber• 3 years ago

Since the linked book is at archive.org: I noticed that it is part of the _Mir Titles_ collection there:

https://archive.org/details/mir-titles

IA's browser e-reader is pretty nice to use overall, and the Mir titles seem to have been converted into various downloadable formats as well, in addition to what I'm guessing is the native PDF.

Props to the collection maintainer. This brings back some really good memories.

Note--It seems like some additional Mir books, in various states of curation, may be accessible via IA through search:

https://archive.org/search?query=Yakov+Perelman

mananaysiempre• 3 years ago

[T]he Mir titles seem to have been converted into various downloadable formats as well, in addition to what I'm guessing is the native PDF.

You don’t have to guess—the IA metadata tells you which formats were originally provided by the uploader and which ones were derived by IA. The “download original” link on the website uses that, or you can pass --source=origial to the CLI[1].

[1] https://archive.org/developers/internetarchive/cli.html#down...

the-mitr3• 3 years ago

I am the curator/maintainer of the mirtitles.org blog and the typesetter of the books.

Thanks for the comment and putting in the perspective. The project started with the idea of preserving this knowledge about 15 years back. I grew up reading those books, but they were nowhere to be found for others to read by the end of 90s. The collection has been a collaborative effort with people from across the globe contributing to it. Though it will take some time (read years/decades), hopefully one day the collection will have all the books published during the Soviet era.

layer84• 3 years ago

I find the blog format a bit confusing. Is there a complete listing of the books somewhere?

eternalban• 3 years ago

Just read The tale about the snowflake that did not melt. Lovely little story. Thank you for sharing all this bounty!

nextos• 3 years ago

Dover still publishes lots of translated MIR books.

Not the same printing quality, but still decent.

cyberax• 3 years ago

I wish someone would translate Fichtenholz's series on calculus ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigorii_Fichtenholz ). They are the best calculus textbook I've ever read, and they really helped me to master calculus.

nsett_• 3 years ago

I spent several weekends in school trawling through second-hand bookshop backrooms trying to find MIR books in that cloth bound thick paper versions..I still have the I F Sharygin book on plane geometry I found that way.

Ah, good old days!

lambdaxymox2• 3 years ago

The construction of MIR titles reminds me a lot of older Springer GTM and Grundlehren der Mathematischen Wissenschaften series titles. I have a number of Springer titles I've picked up over the years and the older printings were beautifully typeset and bound with very good paper. I try to find the older printings of Springer books when I can when chasing down a copy for my personal library.

wrp• 3 years ago

Springer books were beautifully typeset until they started having authors do their own typesetting. That's one of the mixed blessings of LaTeX.

Even into the early 2000s, Springer would often make the first printing of a textbook sewn-bound, then subsequent printings were cheaply perfect-bound. I stopped buying new Springer books online around 2005, because I wanted to check the binding before buying.

nico• 3 years ago

Cool to see a conversation-style section

1980s AI-chat emulation technology: just print the chat history on a book

But seriously, conversation style feels a lot more natural sometimes than just reading a wall of text and trying to decipher its meaning

1MachineElf• 3 years ago

I've been meaning to read up on Frank Ramsey, an early 20th century philosopher, mathematician, and economist, who first postulated that people's actions are determined by the balance between their expectations and their desires. A world built on probability would be up his alley, I imagine.

oh_sigh• 3 years ago

Ramsey is one of those great what-ifs in my mind - just seeing his intellectual output and knowing he died at 26...what would he have given us if he lived a normal life span?

anonymouskimmer3• 3 years ago

I read the preface and there are things I agree with and things I find problematic depending on how the author goes about explaining them. The major one of these last is the seeming identity of probability with randomness.

Statistics and probability are tools humans use to predict outcomes of the world, they are not necessarily accurate reflections of the mechanisms of the world. Maybe I'm strawmanning the author here, I don't know. I may read the full book at some point but probably not yet.

There may very well be a limit where events are random (such as particle decay), but surely even fully determined events can have probabilistic outcomes, when aggregated. Like say you have 4 beads, 3 black and 1 white. And you non-blindly align all combinations of three beads. You'll have four combinations, three of which contain a white bead. So the probabilistic odds of any one combination of three beads containing a white bead is 75%. If a person picks three beads based on preference, another person can say that there's a 75% chance that those three beads will contain a white bead, iterated over enough picks. But the actual picking for all picks is fully determined by the current preference of the person picking the three beads.

DiogenesKynikos• 3 years ago

The book discusses the two sources of randomness early on: unknown information and true randomness. It even identifies Democritus and Epicurus as the philosophers who first identified these sources of randomness.

anonymouskimmer3• 3 years ago

Thank you. I look forward to reading it now.

hgsgm6• 3 years ago

If a person picks three beads based on preference, another person can say that there's a 75% chance that those three beads will contain a white bead, iterated over enough picks.

That's not true, which is the critical point, because preference is not independent.

anonymouskimmer3• 3 years ago

Preference among multiple unrelated people is, at least hypothetically, independent.

DasCorCor• 3 years ago

“… they are not necessarily accurate reflections of the mechanisms of the world.” I would suggest taking a few courses on Quantum Mechanics. ;)

foogazi• 3 years ago

From the preface: Is the result of a dice roll truly random or dependent on physics: angle, velocity, surface ?

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK2• 3 years ago

Randomness is not absolute, but relative. For the one having the computer powerful enough to compute how the dice will roll and bounce, it is not random. For others, it is. That's why people with computers are not allowed into casinos.

In the world of online gambling, someone who knows the seed of the RNG, game outcome is not random. For others, it is. Here people with computers ARE allowed, because it's much harder to break a cryptographic RNG than to calculate physical roulette biases.

layer84• 3 years ago

I suggest acquainting yourself with quantum mechanics.

Pbhaskal• 3 years ago

Cache works on probability. Superscalar processor works on probability. L1, L2 ....cache works on probability

The World is Built on Probability (1984)

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