Comment by snakeyjake

Comment by snakeyjake 2 days ago

>you try to roll a million fair dice and get them to all come up six.

That is not a low probability event; that is an impossibility.

I think the problem here is that you think I am a digital electronic computer. I am not.

I am a human being.

I do not now, have never, and will never care about the technically possible I only care about the actually possible.

As a human, I know that six to the power of one million is impossible. Not to mention that rolling one million dice is absurd.

But as a human I also know that the chemical reaction needed to spark life isn't a six to the power of one million proposition.

I don't know what it is but it ain't that because it's been done, at least once.

edit: It's not absurd, rolling one million dice.

The heaviest verifiable weight ever lifted by a human being is 2422.18kg.

A 4mm die is 0.4g. Conceivably a contraption could be built by which a human could "roll" several million dice using the strength of their entire body.

Now I kinda want that to happen.

tsimionescu 2 days ago

> As a human, I know that six to the power of one million is impossible.

This is plain wrong. If you roll a million dice, anything that comes up has the exact same probability. We think all 6 is special because it holds some meaning to us, but it is exactly as likely as any other result. So any result has a probability of 6^1M to happen. And yet, one of those 6^1M configurations will happen with probability 1.

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snakeyjake 2 days ago

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- tsimionescu 2 days ago
  
  I'm not saying that we'll see the all six combination if we actually threw a million dice. I'm saying that if we throw a million dice, we'll see some combination, and that should be just as amazing as the all six combination, because, whatever it is, it was monumentally unlucky to happen.
  My only point is that there is no way to say "events with probability < X are impossible in real life", for X > 0. For any probability value, it's trivial to construct an experiment that will be guaranteed to have an outcome whose probability is that low.
  
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  prmph a day ago
  
  This argument I think hints at something i regard as mysterious regarding probability as applied to the real world (as opposed to the platonic, pure math concept)
  My own view is that there something deep about probability akin to the measurement problem. My view is that probability is not an objective fixed thing, but that it is something relative to the observer of experiments.
  
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  tsimionescu a day ago
  
  > My view is that probability is not an objective fixed thing, but that it is something relative to the observer of experiments.
  This is basically the Bayesian view of probability - that probability is a measure of the knowledge of an agent, not a property of a system. There are even some interpretations of QM that try to find a way to apply this to the measurement problem.
  However, for this particular case, I don't think there is anything all that mysterious. If a process is more or less equally likely to produce any of a huge number of outcomes, it stands to reason that you can't predict which outcome will happen, even while knowing some outcome is fully guaranteed.
  
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