4 ms·

> virtually certain: 99-100% Hopefully whoever wrote that never works in a data center, builds cars, sells insurance, gambles, works on crypto, does scientific

> virtually certain: 99-100% Hopefully whoever wrote that never works in a data center, builds cars, sells insurance, gambles, works on crypto, does scientific computing, or is ever responsible for someone's life.

csours 8y ago
If you do any of those things, you use actual numbers with your words - which, if you actually care about the subject at hand, you should have used numbers in the first place.
icedchai 8y ago
You're not much of a risk taker, are you?
throwawaymath 8y ago
Implicit in your statement is the claim that you cannot acknowledge the existence of a percentile without believing any given feature of your domain can easily satisfy that percentile. That's a non sequitur. The conclusion that follows from that one is also very strange, because it would mean we shouldn't bother quantifying things (or having a name for them) if they can only be expected to happen extremely rarely.
ehrman 8y ago
If you're talking the realm of five 9s, etc, that's in reference to service availability at some given point in time throughout the course of a year. If you discuss the probability there will be an outage once during a year, the answer is somewhere in the middle, around "more likely than not". You could use this same probability around a pacemaker. The device is virtually certain (99%) to function at a given point throughout the year, but the probability that the device will not fail over the course of the year is not 99%. If the pacemaker had a 99% chance of not failing once during the course of a year, it would be virtually certain it would not fail during that year.
DEADBEEFC0FFEE 8y ago
Well, you'd use different scales for those domains. If you thinking about crop failure, floods, macroeconomics, population trends, etc, 99% is fine for certainty. Do you agree?

4 ms·

> virtually certain: 99-100% Hopefully whoever wrote that never works in a data center, builds cars, sells insurance, gambles, works on crypto, does scientific

by tinalumfoil 8y ago

csours 8y ago
If you do any of those things, you use actual numbers with your words - which, if you actually care about the subject at hand, you should have used numbers in the first place.
icedchai 8y ago
You're not much of a risk taker, are you?
throwawaymath 8y ago
Implicit in your statement is the claim that you cannot acknowledge the existence of a percentile without believing any given feature of your domain can easily satisfy that percentile. That's a non sequitur. The conclusion that follows from that one is also very strange, because it would mean we shouldn't bother quantifying things (or having a name for them) if they can only be expected to happen extremely rarely.
ehrman 8y ago
If you're talking the realm of five 9s, etc, that's in reference to service availability at some given point in time throughout the course of a year. If you discuss the probability there will be an outage once during a year, the answer is somewhere in the middle, around "more likely than not". You could use this same probability around a pacemaker. The device is virtually certain (99%) to function at a given point throughout the year, but the probability that the device will not fail over the course of the year is not 99%. If the pacemaker had a 99% chance of not failing once during the course of a year, it would be virtually certain it would not fail during that year.
DEADBEEFC0FFEE 8y ago
Well, you'd use different scales for those domains. If you thinking about crop failure, floods, macroeconomics, population trends, etc, 99% is fine for certainty. Do you agree?