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Re: starship-design: Irrational Odds
Ken Wharton wrote:
>Isaac writes:
>>>You can do an experiment of asking people how they're doing. A
>>>large portion of them will actually respond by saying "fine" or whatever,
>>>even though the odds of everyone "randomly" behaving this way (and not
>>>saying random words, clawing your eyeballs out, etc.) are inconceivable.
>>>Every time you can even somewhat-accurately predict how someone will
>react
>>>to a given set of circumstances, you are helping to refute the infinite-
>>>universe possibility.
>>Here you demonstrate how little you understand about probability and
>>what it means to be a random event.
>>Consider a hypothetical lottery which is randomly determined. You
>>buy one of those tickets. Whether you win or not is random, and
>>yet the most likely result is that you lose. Just because something
>>is random doesn't mean the chances are 50-50.
>>Similarly, if you go up to John Smith and ask him how he's doing.
>>Most of the time he'll say "fine".
>Ahhh - but once you start thinking in terms of multiple universes, you lose
>the idea of probability. What does it mean to have one universe that is
>less probable than another? If a universe exists it's probability is one;
>the only probability involved is Which universe we happen to find ourselves
>in right now. And that would mean that there have to be a lot of identical
>universes where John Smith says "fine" for every universe in which he says
>"hovercraft" just to make the odds turn out right.
If a universe exists, its probability of existing is indeed 1. So?
If we can never access that universe, what difference does that make?
BTW, out current understanding doesn't just involve 1 or two or a
million million million simultaneous possibilities--it involves an
infinite continuum of possibilities. It's not even a countable
infinity.
>But that leads to more problems. Suppose you have a quantum event that has
>a 1/pi chance of coming out A, and a (1 - 1/pi) chance of coming out B. If
>the universe really splits off into alternate possible universes for each
>outcome, with each of the universes as "real" as the others, then there's
>no way to do it. Even if you have lots of universes, because pi is
>irrational there's no way to make the odds come out correctly.
Wrong. Consider the act of choosing randomly from [0,1] with the
Lebesgue probability distribution. The probability of picking a
number in [0,1/pi] is exactly 1/pi.
I'm not about to go through the trouble of teaching you measure theory
and probability theory.
--
_____ Isaac Kuo kuo@bit.csc.lsu.edu http://www.csc.lsu.edu/~kuo
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