🧵 probability is a meme
Anonymous at Sun, 20 Oct 2024 06:41:52 UTC No. 16440866
as long as there is not 100% likelihood there is 100% likelihood of an unfavorable outcome across an infinite series of attempts.
say for example, i had a coinflip bet. I have the options to win if i choose tails, i flip the coin an infinite amount of times and get caught in an endless loop of heads. I'm just that unlucky. probability says I have a 50% *chance* which is correct, but miraculously i have gotten heads an infinite amount of times. what happened there?
Anonymous at Sun, 20 Oct 2024 07:24:44 UTC No. 16440894
You can't flip a coin an infinite amount of times because you could just flip a coin 1 more time to prove it wasn't infinite. However many times you did flip it, you just beat the odds that many times, which on a 50% chance has a .5^x chance of happening. Simple as.
Anonymous at Sun, 20 Oct 2024 08:02:19 UTC No. 16440909
>>16440866
Probability isn't a meme, you just don't understand it.
Your probability of getting no tails in n-coin flips is modeled well by a geometric distribution which models the "time-between successes" for binary random variables like coin flips. You'd see that this probability exponentially decays with the probability of landing on tails for your coin.
At any particular n, you have a low but non-zero probability of needing that many coin flips to get tails the first time.
However, the limiting probability is zero.
At the limit of n to infinity, your probability of never getting tails at all in any of your coin flips is zero, so it is accurately described as an impossible event.
Anonymous at Sun, 20 Oct 2024 08:04:08 UTC No. 16440910
>>16440866
You must be 18 years or older to post on 4chan.
Come back when you've finished high school.
Anonymous at Sun, 20 Oct 2024 15:18:23 UTC No. 16441280
>>16440866
If there are 2 choices, maybe you should flip the coin before flipping it, all your tosses end up same way, because flipping a coin obeys law of classical mechanics and you do same motion each time.
6 at Sun, 20 Oct 2024 16:48:12 UTC No. 16441367
>>16440909
I think what he's trying to say is probability is non deterministic probability is useful to a degree however people these days seem to praise it as the end all be all and make assertions that probability distributions despite variance are deterministic.
This is especially true in the social sciences and biology.
Way to much reliance on statistical theory. And not precise measurements or deterministic characteristics.
Anonymous at Sun, 20 Oct 2024 17:09:24 UTC No. 16441386
>if chance is non-zero then chance is 100%
fuck entropy
Anonymous at Sun, 20 Oct 2024 17:17:49 UTC No. 16441394
>>16441367
I'm not entirely sure what you mean.
Yes, people in social sciences and biology rely quite a lot on statistical distributions (despite often having very little actual statistics education, meaning they generally don't understand much about what they are doing).
"Deterministic distributions" like you are talking about are generally called "parametric models" within statistical literature because they are models that you as a researcher impose onto some dataset, conditional on parameters that either need to be estimated or asserted a priori. The oft-quoted but very rarely understood saying "All models are wrong, but some models are useful" applies here, as it does even in harder sciences like physics, chemistry, the more analytical parts of engineering and computer science etc.
Just as reality has no exact parametric models which perfectly map onto "physical random variables," reality also has no exact "laws of nature" as these are in fact inferential models we impose to explain the world around us. Nonetheless, they are useful.