4 ms·
> (There might be a 1E-50000 chance that the Sun won't rise tomorrow because all of the atoms in the Sun fuse at the same time and it blows up.) To estimate pr
by forgotpwtomain 11y ago
> (There might be a 1E-50000 chance that the Sun won't rise tomorrow because all of the atoms in the Sun fuse at the same time and it blows up.)
To estimate probability of an event you must have a sample were both have occurred, to provide a probability for something like the Sun not rising tomorrow is pure non-sense.
- inimino 11y agoYou can easily calculate the probability of flipping heads a million times in a row, even though this also has never happened.
- trentlott 11y agoBecause we have sampled all states of the hypothetical quarter, and are constricting many, many values concerned with flipping. The same can't be said for the atoms in the sun.
- lmm 11y agoWe have complete, verified descriptions of what the possible states look like. You can predict precisely how long it will take a cannonball to fall to the ground (at least in a vacuum), even if you've never dropped it from exactly that particular height before.
- dalke 11y ago"Precise" - to within some tolerance. At some point you reach the uncertainty limits allowed by quantum mechanics. You also have to make an arbitrary decision about when the cannonball touches the ground. How much interaction is needed between the atoms of the cannonball and ground before you say there's contact? These issues don't exist in the GoL universe.