Rage Online

These are the basic facts with reguard to oxford united
1 A new management team has to be put in place at the club as results league position and recent displays show.

2 A number of players are just not good enough to play conferance football and will only drag the club down .

3 The return of regular reserve team playing regular games is a
basic requirement that must be addressed for the future well being of the club.

4 The new chairman must make the appointment of replacements for Patterson and Lewis NOW enough is enough act tonight to give the fans hope and the club a future

Seems to me thatÔÇÖs a quartet of opinions rather than facts.

Questions re: your facts STEVE
1. Who?
2. Which players?
4. See 1

And my opinion re. 3 - I would not disagree with you on that.

&quotSTEVE F&quot wrote:These are the basic facts with reguard to oxford united
1 A new management team has to be put in place at the club as results league position and recent displays show.

2 A number of players are just not good enough to play conferance football and will only drag the club down .

3 The return of regular reserve team playing regular games is a
basic requirement that must be addressed for the future well being of the club.

4 The new chairman must make the appointment of replacements for Patterson and Lewis NOW enough is enough act tonight to give the fans hope and the club a future

Here are some basic facts as to your post:

1. Your &quotfacts&quot are actually opinions.

2. That's it.

Can we actually regard any proposition as a &quotfact&quot if it falls short of scientific standards of probability? Can we reasonably regard anything as being self-evident and if so, what would be the criteria for our doing so?

&quotPeña Oxford United&quot wrote:Can we actually regard any proposition as a &quotfact&quot if it falls short of scientific standards of probability? Can we reasonably regard anything as being self-evident and if so, what would be the criteria for our doing so?

it's this kind of scepticism that's in danger of bringing the church and society down. any right-thinking freeman of oxfordshire knows what the answer is: chuck patterson off carfax tower. if he flies, he's a minion of the devil. otherwise, he should be in the job for life.

&quotPeña Oxford United&quot wrote:Can we actually regard any proposition as a &quotfact&quot if it falls short of scientific standards of probability? Can we reasonably regard anything as being self-evident and if so, what would be the criteria for our doing so?

I think the criteria is that it has to have the ability to be reproduced and the outcome has to be the same every time.

Technically, science doesn't regard anything as 'fact', merely 'something that has yet to be disproved'. Hence science also rejects anything which is inherently non-disprovable, since that is a 'belief' rather than a 'theory'. Finally, when selecting between two competing theories, the one which requires the least assumptions is chosen (this is known as Occam's Razor).

Statement 1 includes an implied test that if the management team were to be replaced, results, performances and league position would improve. The first of those is certainly measurable, the second is subjective, but could be measured e.g. by sampling fan opinions, and the third is also measurable, but affected by a lot of external factors. The main problem is that for a truly fair test, you would need to create a copy of Oxford United (and probably the entire BSP) to keep running as a control, in order to measure the performance in a truly relative way. Alternatively, you could decide over which period of time to measure the performance of the existing team, and then allow a new team the same period of time and compare, but you'd need to be a lot more careful about the interpretation of the results. The main problem is that it's a destructive test with a single sample, which is generally considered to be poor science (c.f. climate change). Perhaps some preliminary research into human cloning would help here.

Statement 2 is interesting. &quotNot good enough&quot would appear to be a subjective statement, however we can probably assume that a reasonable set of market forces is at work in the football player employment market, thus &quotcurrently employed by a Conference club&quot might be a decent proxy measure for &quotgood enough to play in the Conference&quot, although I suspect that there is a significant dampening factor to the results, due to injuries and the length of player contracts, and perhaps inadequacies in the scouting system.

Statement 3 is perhaps the most testable, because we can research which teams play reserve matches and which don't and compare their relative performance. Unfortunately, Oxford suffers from another scientific problem, in that it sits at the extreme end of the data set for many of the measures required to analyse a comparable club, e.g. crowd size, former performance, stadium cost, etc. This means that the analysis will probably have to be extrapolated rather than interpolated, which always introduces a significant amount of error. Nevertheless, running the numbers on this would probably be worthwhile.

Statement 4 rather requires proving that Statement 1 is correct, but (and this is the problem with destructive testing of a single sample) testing Statement 1 involves undertaking the experiment in Statement 4 and hoping that the hypothesis is correct.

Hope that helps, Peña

Can' t believe you wrote all that without saying &quotKarl Popper&quot. And where's the bibliography?

&quotPeña Oxford United&quot wrote:Can' t believe you wrote all that without saying &quotKarl Popper&quot. And where's the bibliography?

Well, I've got plenty of free time at the moment, because I'm programming massive complex simulations, and running them with various parameter sets. Each simulation run takes a couple of hours, before popping out the answer: &quotThe economy's fucked!&quot

&quotSmileyMan&quot wrote: &quotThe economy's fucked!&quot

So does it mean that that's an opinion or a fact.

Screw Popper. I prefer discovery-based science. I think that means 'AFC Oxford' rather than 'Patto out' in the context of the first post.

Pavlov's dog must have a bearing on this, but I don't think the dog ever went up Carfax tower.

Yes very clever all of you. So you're basically telling new poster Steve F to piss off?

New poster?

OK. NewISH poster. OK?