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The Slippery Eel of Probability
- jonahx 11y agoCouching this as a mysterious and shocking challenge to our belief in the certainty of math is silly. It doesn't prove that probability problems can "many different answers, all apparently equally valid" -- it just proves that humans can create questions that seem well-formed when in fact they are not.
- Xcelerate 11y agoThe problem provided in the article and Bertrand's paradox don't seem to have "more than one answer" to me. The problems are incomplete and ill-posed. Taken to its extreme, it would be like asking: what is the probability that more than 1,000 unobservable universes exist outside of our own? So little is specified that you can't even begin to calculate a probability; the question is meaningless (particularly since there's no way to test your prediction, even in theory).
- buzzdenver 11y agoA similar one is the Sleeping Beauty Problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeping_Beauty_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeping_Beauty_problem I agree with the other two posts that problems like these are very uninteresting from a math point of view.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]