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Why Improbable Things Really Aren't
First time accepted submitter sixoh1 writes "Scientific American has an excellent summary of a new book 'The Improbabilty Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day' by David J. Hand. The summary offers a quick way to relate statistical math (something that's really hard to intuit) to our daily experiences with unlikely events. The simple equations here make it easier to understand that improbable things really are not so improbable, which Hand call the 'Improbability Principle:' 'How can a huge number of opportunities occur without people realizing they are there? The law of combinations, a related strand of the Improbability Principle, points the way. It says: the number of combinations of interacting elements increases exponentially with the number of elements. The 'birthday problem' is a well-known example. Now if only we could harness this to make an infinite improbability drive!"
My theory of the question for life, the universe, and everything.
The books rely heavily on probability (even as far as powering the faster than light engine as alluded in the summary).
A pair of dice is one of, of not the most common symbol for probability, chance, and luck (at least in Anglo-American culture). And how many pips are on a pair of dice?
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
There are well defined techniques for measuring the probability of events happening in industrial safety. Safety Integrity Levels or SIL are used to categorize the possibility of a life threatening event occurring.
The problem is how low a risk do you need and how much will it cost you to get there. Fukashima would probably not have happened if the sea wall had been higher, but the designers had to make the judgement that it was not worth the millions of cost required to build a bigger wall compared to risk of it being breached. Unfortunately decisions like that in hindsight always look flawed.,
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
Firstly, Pratchett's comment has nothing to do with a paradox something of the sort. It's a simple claim that scientists are bad at estimating very small probabilities, and typically get them wrong by a factor of hundreds of thousands. This is actually true and rather insightful in a the-emperor-has-no-clothes kind of way, and also not very deep at all.
The concept of the long tail is somewhat more interesting, but not that deep either. It's merely about realizing that many processes aren't Gaussian, unlike what students are lead to believe in highschool and various introductory courses which are not primarily about statistics.
However, your distinction between likely and unlikely events is confused. If you are going to label two events as likely and unlikely, then you are asserting that the likely event is to be observed with higher probability than the unlikely event. This is always true by definition.
What you are trying to say is that, if you restrict yourself to a particular family of events and you compare the probability of occurrence of an unspecified member of the family with the probability of occurrence of a single specified member, then the former can be larger.
As an example, consider the family of events {the hour of your death is N}. It is fairly unlikely that I can predict the hour of your death (not being a serial killer myself), so if I specify the event {the hour of your death is 12am} then the probability of occurrence is small. But if I do not specify the event, by saying {the hour of your death is N, where N is some hour in the day}, then that event is certain. Of course I haven't said anything interesting *with certainty*, whereas in the case of 12am I have said something interesting *with low probability*.
The tragedy of statistics is that the great majority of things we know with high probability aren't interesting, and the majority of things that are interesting have low probabilities or cannot be estimated accurately.
applied to debunking so-called "Intelligent Design". There are a few high profile proponents who claim that the probability of an organism as complex as humans evolving from single celled ancestors is so small as to be impossible, therefore we must have been "designed" by "someone" (a variation on the God of the gaps principle used by others for the same purpose). They like to point out eyes as organs that are so complex they could not have evolved, even though we have numerous living organisms that have organisms with photosensitive sensitive organs that aren't quite eyes, perhaps on their way to becoming eyes, many generations/mutations down the road.
In a single field of view under a microscope I can see tens of thousands of bacteria swimming around in a drop of water. Multiple that by all the drops of water in the world and you quickly realize that the number of living organisms is a HUGE number. With all that genetic replication (with errors that sometimes result) and gene swapping going on, and all the DNA floating around freely in the waters of the world, it seems inevitable that there will be enough mutations taking place to produce the variety of life we see on earth.