Re: What would make you believe?

mcv <mcvmcv@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> Michael Ash <mike@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>> Just out of curiosity, how did you decide on that probability? You
think 
>> that there's a one-in-a-million chance that he's actually from the
future. 
>> There are probably a million people on the planet who think they're
from 
>> the future. Do you really think it's likely that one of them is *right*

>> about it?
> 
> Not in the least, but that's not how probabilities work, although it's
> impossible to get the probabilities of complex situations like this
> correct intuitively.
> The basic probability that we're talking about here is the chance that
> time travel is even possible. According to my current world view,
there's
> no chance in hell, but my current world view could easily be wrong. I
> estimate that chance well over 0.01. The chance that time travel is
> possible? No idea, but if someone like Stephen Hawking has seriously
> considered the possibility, who am I to say that chance is smaller
> than 0.001?
> 
> Now, given the chance that time travel is possible, what's the chance
> that mankind will seriously fuck up and nearly wipe themselves out?
> Pretty big IMO. We've seen several serious scenarios for doing that
> in the past decades, so I'm certainly willing to grant this a 0.1
> chance. Considering this scenario, what's the chance that someone
> will travel back in time and try to prevent it? Given that time
> travel is possible? Well, they need to discover it first, ofcourse,
> but if it's possible, chances are it will be discovered sooner or
> later.
> 
> So, given all of that, what's the chance that they'll pick *me* for
> their bizarre mission to save the world? Tiny ofcourse, but better
> than average, I suspect. I'm smart, educated, open to questioning what
> I believe in, willing to spend money on good causes rather than indulge
> in hedonism, and I live in a part of the world with better than average
> access to whatever resources might be necessary for such a mission.
> 
> The end result is bound to be a ridiculously small chance, but given
> that someone is at my door telling me this increases the chance. Not
> to any actually likely odds, but to, I don't know, wild guess:
> 0.000001? The man at my door is much easier explained by the theory
> that he's delusional, but this unlikely scenario also suits these
> events remarkably well. It'd be stupid to deny that, even if there's
> still 99.9999% chance it's nonsense.

Putting together the numbers, you think the chances are 1 in 100 that they

will pick you for their mission. That's either a huge ego or a poor grasp 
of the math.

If you meant that you think there's a one in a million chance that they 
would pick you, then you need to multiply that by the other chances (that 
time travel is possible, and that a catastrophe will occur) to get the 
final probability, resulting in a probability of one in ten billion, not 
one in a million. Still on the high side IMO, but now getting to the point

where this person can be ignored.

>> One in a million seems inconceivably generous to me. Despite hanging
out 
>> in this group, I'm not particularly SF-credulous in real life (and why 
>> should I be? These sorts of things just don't happen) and I would put
the 
>> chances that he's telling the truth at something more like one in one 
>> quintillion, or lower yet.
> 
> I'm not particularly SF-credulous in real life either, and I agree
> that these things just don't happen, but it'd be unbelievably arrogant
> to insist that there's no chance that my view of the world is the only
> possibility, and that there's not even 0.1% chance that I'm wrong.

That's an interesting way of evaluating things. By this logic you ought to

be buying lottery tickets *all the time*. I mean, your view of the world 
probably tells you that your chances of winning are too remote for it to 
pay off, but you have a 0.1% chance of being wrong about that. Crunching 
the numbers, it becomes well worthwhile to play constantly. Do you?

(This sort of thinking would actually explain pretty well why so many 
people play. Maybe some of them know that they have little chance of 
winning but are banking on being wrong about it.)

> I'm estimating the chances that I'm wrong in some of the things I
> believe in much higher than that. Well over 50%, actually (I just
> don't know *which* things I'd be wrong at). I estimate the chances
> of time travelling being possible much smaller ofcourse, but mainly
> because if time travel was possible, we (and history) should be
> flooded with time travellers. Mankind wiping itself out shortly
> after the discovery of time travel would explain the lack of time
> travellers quite well, however, making it possibly one of the more
> realistic (though still very unlikely) time travel scenarios.

Actually I believe the story was that disaster occurred, mankind was 
*almost* wiped out, recovered, has a reasonably warm and fuzzy life, then 
started to time travel to see if the disaster could be stopped.

There's another wrench to throw into the probabilities: after all the 
wrangling over whether it's possible and whether they would pick you, you 
have the question of whether this project would happen. This is so far 
into the future that the disaster is a distant memory. They know that the 
end result was happy (they're still around, right?) and could have easily 
gone bad (a thousand individuals could easily become zero) so why mess 
with success? Imagine if time travel were invented today. I could easily 
see things like people going back to mess with the Holocaust (despite the 
risk of inadvertently creating a world where everyone is white, blue eyed,

blond haired, and speaking German) but how about going back to an ice age 
and trying to prevent a population bottleneck then?

> I'm sticking with my original assessment of the situation: this
> story is well worth my $1.

That could be, but there are other ways for that to be true than that his 
story is true.

By the way, can I have a dollar? :)

-- 
Michael Ash
Rogue Amoeba Software