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I disagree. Calling it improbable rather than impossible muddles language. It's a fake sort of precision that removes an important qualitative distinction, and
by Certhas 10y ago
I disagree. Calling it improbable rather than impossible muddles language. It's a fake sort of precision that removes an important qualitative distinction, and that is what bothered me the most about this discourse. A lot of naive language prescriptivist that want to discard perfectly good words for the sake of an irrelevant logical/philosophical point.
It's improbable to flip a coin 10 times and get head ten times. It's for all practical purposes impossible to do so 10^10 times. This level of mathematical probability is functionally indistinguishable from 0 thus it is entirely accurate to call it impossible.
It's not logically impossible of course, it just happens not to be possible in our universe. It's physically impossible. Like the prime cookie. The appropriate amount of time spent on investigating prime cookies is not "very small", it's 0.
Now there is of course reason to investigate the EM Drive to some degree: To figure out where the bug was. To learn about potential experimental errors. As a puzzle, to solve the apparent paradox. But any other framing of the issue is dishonest.