The Strange Tectonic Coincidence of Mexico’s September Earthquakes | Hacker News Reader

The Strange Tectonic Coincidence of Mexico’s September Earthquakes

newyorker.com

43 pointsanthotny19 comments

The New Yorker could be that much better if they would occasionally include technical graphics. In this case, how about a rendering of the plate mechanics that are the subject of the article?

They are quite happy to print line drawings, comics, and full-page photos, so it's not like they're scared of non-text content. Yet I've seen them devote multiple paragraphs to describing a scatterplot that stunned some scientist they were profiling.

There is another one today - 6.2 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/23/mexico-new-ear...

Summary: the epicenters of the two quakes were far apart. Correlation does not equal causation.

Also Mexico City is built on a swamp/marsh[1], like a suprisingly large proportion of capital cities (London, Berlin, Paris, etc. )

[1] IIRC the difference between a swamp and a marsh is one of ph.

Difference between a swamp and a marsh is the type of plants. Swamps are to forests what marshes are to prairie. You might be thinking of the difference between fens and bogs which ph is a distinguishing characteristic.

https://www.epa.gov/wetlands/wetlands-classification-and-typ...

Something might be wrong with my browser, I didn't receive a 451 when visiting that page. Or should it be 404 since it never existed?

Thank you! I should have looked it up.

>like a suprisingly large proportion of capital cities

Not a massive surprise - Cities are enduring hubs for commerce, and so usually rise around strong transport infrastructure, which going back far enough meant waterways.

Extensive development is facilitated with the presence of large areas of flat land.

Put those two together and you're looking for flatland surrounding major waterways: Swamps and marshes.

To be pedantic, it's more that there isn't enough data to even say that there's any correlation to begin with, and also that our understanding of the origin of the two quakes refutes a shared cause.

A usage note: the phrase "correlation does not equal causation" is usually reserved for the case where two variables A and B have a correlation in the data that isn't just due to sampling accident, and hence are causally connected, but just not in the naive sense of A causing B. It may be that B causes A or that a third variable C causes both. But a true correlation in the underlying process always has some causal explanation.

That's false, unless you assert the lack of free will.

Are you talking about the social concept / illusion of "free will", or actual free will? Because actual free will clearly cannot exist.

Either your actions are fully dictated by physics and your prior state (meaning know free choice), or your actions are influenced by randomness meaning random choice (but again not free choice).

I do agree that the societal illusion of free-will along with associating legal consequences to actions is the only way we can have a functioning society.

I think it is somewhat of a grey area if you are free to influence the world, but your choices reflect your preferences. I think it is better to argue about whether consciousness has causal power, since that is semantically clearer.

Free will is a tricky subject. It certainly feels like I can deliberate and come to a free choice, by abstracting decisions from my immediate and prior influences.

I have previously tried to come to terms with not having free will, and it left me feeling stripped of any agency / control, utterly depressed, demotivated, and incapable of doing anything. If there is no reason for my actions, other than the initial state of the universe evolving forward in time, then there is no point to anything. Most people can't live like that.

Could there be an alternative explanation, based on unknown physics; selecting between different permissible universes?

I heard an argument from Terence McKenna that I liked, along the lines of: You should choose to believe in free will, because it appears that we have it. If you choose to believe in it, and it doesn't exist, then you had no choice but to believe in it anyway.

I think the phrase 'You can do what you will. But you can't will what you will.' is the correct perspective.

People are repulsed by the idea of having no free will because of their biology; meaning seems to be what drives our conscious thought. I think Terence's argument can be made simpler: You don't have the free will to choose whether the absence of free will bother you.

That being said, I hope this argument nudges you in a better direction: Trying to 'will what you will' only leads to pointless frustration(you can't change the laws of the universe). Accept this, and allow yourself to 'do what you will'. Somehow, we have the power to do this.

Give up on free will; the rest of the universe doesn't seem to be bothered over it. Best of luck, fellow lifeform.

But that is a fallacy of excluding the middle; your point feels intuitively true, but is not necessarily the case

It is possible for something to not be simply and entirely caused by a prior state, and yet not be random

Understanding this does require a kind of thinking that our brains find difficult, though

>"But a true correlation in the underlying process always has some causal explanation."

In the vast majority of cases, A really is correlated with B to some extent. People have done this with large social science datasets since at least the 1960s, they find everything is correlated with everything else.

So, whether a correlation merely exists is not interesting to begin with (there are some exceptions in physics where theory really predicts zero correlation). Yes, this means all the people currently plugging away at checking for the mere existence of correlations are wasting their time and (probably) taxpayer money.

True. A more useful phrase might be something like, "magnitude (and direction) of correlation may differ substantially from magnitude (and direction) of causation".

Actually, with two observations and two variables, correlation is always perfect. Statistical inference begins with three observations.

Illuminati confirmed! Obviously this is some sort of earthquake weapon made to do... uh, what exactly? Cause, you know, earthquakes and aftershocks are not naturally occurring things near tectonic plates... so we need to attribute it to some dark god^H^H^H government conspiracy in order to explain this.

The article is actually a pretty good piece on skepticism. But the title is just bait for stupid people to feed into their fears. If the attempt was to make it clickbaity for people to click on it in order to debunk any notions people might have they failed. Stupid people only read headlines not articles.

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