the kind of math I like
makes a good point about how probability calculations can be very flawed
https://youtu.be/nQVgt5eFMh4?t=818
The background is that Derren claims to have a foolproof system and brings a handful of people where he's already given them several winning tips in a row. All the "winners" have received, I forget, four or five consecutive winning tips.
He also shows, at 9:45, how he can throw ten heads in a row. (See if you can work out how he did it, as he goes on to explain how he did!)
From the winner's perspective they have all received four winning tips. The chances of that was 1 in 1296. What you're not told follows. He chose those races so they all had six runners. initially he started out with 7776 people and emailed everyone. For the first race he sent 1 in 6 the first horse, 1 in 6 the second horse etc. Thus he has 1296 "winners" going to the second race. He repeats this process for each race, thus after two races has 216, three races 36, and four races 6 "winners". He invites these six to a race track but keeps them seperate. The "winner" of that race is then shown and the final trick played on another race.
The trick relies on only showing the winner giving the impression that he is good at predicting races.
The video on the Earth/Human extinction is similar logic in that all we know is that we've survived. But with a sample size of one (human race/Earth), are we just plain lucky to have survived so long (where all the others usually die out), or not?
Quote: charliepatrick
The video on the Earth/Human extinction is similar logic in that all we know is that we've survived. But with a sample size of one (human race/Earth), are we just plain lucky to have survived so long (where all the others usually die out), or not?
link to original post
The ways another mass extinction could occur are so numerous it's hard to count them all. The universe is a dangerous place, very explosive. The coronal mass ejection problem is a ticking time bomb, seems to be the one with the shortest fuse* Massive volcanism another one , but longer fuse perhaps. But there are many others, it is quite likely we have been lucky. Some say literally lucky, as one instance of volcanic devastation some say nearly got us, possibly down to not much more than a handful, when we had not left Africa yet.
* mixed metaphor?
This is generally known as the ":Baltimore Stockbroker" scam, noted here in Wikipedia. I've seen it mentioned in a lot of media, including "Hustle", probably one of the better series about a long-con crew (as opposed to 'Leverage' et. al.)Quote: charliepatrick(snipped for relevance)
...look at Derren Brown's "The System"...
The background is that Derren claims to have a foolproof system and brings a handful of people where he's already given them several winning tips in a row. All the "winners" have received, I forget, four or five consecutive winning tips.
link to original post
One of the more outre variants of this was in Larry Niven's Ringworld series about the 'luck' of Teela Brown.
Quote: WikipediaTeela Brown was a member of the crew recruited by Puppeteer Nessus for an expedition to the Ringworld. Her sole qualification was that she was descended from "lucky" ancestors, six generations of whom were born as a result of winning Earth's Birthright Lottery. The consequence of her state was that she'd led such a charmed and worry-free life that she was emotionally immature and unprepared for "harsh reality." The Puppeteer saw this as a kind of artificial selection, tending to breed for a psionic power of good luck. He hoped Teela would bring luck and success to the entire expedition.
link to Wikipedia article
The Puppeteers were one of the most advanced civilizations in the galaxy, but they, too, fell prey to a aberrant view of what luck is. That is, unless Teela Brown was a clurichaun.
Quote: odiousgambitQuote: charliepatrick
The video on the Earth/Human extinction is similar logic in that all we know is that we've survived. But with a sample size of one (human race/Earth), are we just plain lucky to have survived so long (where all the others usually die out), or not?
link to original post
The ways another mass extinction could occur are so numerous it's hard to count them all. The universe is a dangerous place, very explosive. The coronal mass ejection problem is a ticking time bomb, seems to be the one with the shortest fuse* Massive volcanism another one , but longer fuse perhaps. But there are many others, it is quite likely we have been lucky. Some say literally lucky, as one instance of volcanic devastation some say nearly got us, possibly down to not much more than a handful, when we had not left Africa yet.
* mixed metaphor?
link to original post
A large-scale solar flare with associated coronal mass ejection (i.e. A Carrington Event), is far more possible than one would think. We dodged one in 2012, when we caught the fringes of an X37 flare (the largest one ever measured), and a CME with the size and strength of the Carrington Event tore through Earth's orbit about 9 days before we got there, hitting a solar observatory satellite called STEREO-A. We were so damned lucky it's hard to convey.
Quote: NASA
In February 2014, physicist Pete Riley of Predictive Science Inc. published a paper in Space Weather entitled "On the probability of occurrence of extreme space weather events." In it, he analyzed records of solar storms going back 50+ years. By extrapolating the frequency of ordinary storms to the extreme, he calculated the odds that a Carrington-class storm would hit Earth in the next ten years.
The answer: 12%.
"Initially, I was quite surprised that the odds were so high, but the statistics appear to be correct," says Riley. "It is a sobering figure."Link to article
As far as the volcanic episode "that almost got us", that is the Toba Catastrophe Theory, which uses genetic geneology methods to determine that all of mankind came from a pool of perhaps 10,000 individuals about 70k years ago. There's a lot of kvetching back and forth about it, but it seems right.
My money is on an large comet impactor—one that fragments during a close approach, then impacts a year or so later, much like Shoemaker-Levy 9 did to Jupiter. Reason? The unmistakable near miss, and sentence of impact, will unleash all the destructive impulses of mankind. In the year after the near-miss and before the impact, nuclear war will wipe out a big chunk of mankind, and the impacting comet pieces will finish off the rest.
The cosmos is a dangerous and unfriendly place.
