Re: What would make you believe?

Michael Ash <mike@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> Erik Max Francis <max@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>> Michael Ash wrote:
>> 
>>> 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?
>> 
>> Actually I was working my way up to mentioning this in my next reply. 
>> If you assume that this is an American lottery, the chances of you
being 
>> selected are one in a few hundred million.  That's _less_ than the 
>> official chances of you winning the lottery right there!  And that's 
>> _combined_ with the probabilities that you think he's actually a time 
>> traveller.
> 
> The theory put forth here was that he was so attractive, being smart, 
> well-off, open-minded, etc. that he had a much greater chance of being 
> selected than the average person, so dividing by the size of the 
> population wouldn't work.

To push the discussion into a completely different direction: suppose
you were a time traveller from the future with the job of selecting
someone to help you save the world. How would you select that person?
Someone very gullible is ofcourse easy to convince to buy that ticket,
but may not be the best person to use that money in such a responsible
way as to actually accomplish what you're trying to accomplish.

> Apparently this effect is so strong that he has 
> a 1% chance of being selected out of the entire population, which is 
> pretty nuts.

But that's not quite how simplistic the logic complex relationships
between unlikely events works, I'm afraid. If you happen to still be
in university, follow some advanced logic classes. Probabilities of
proposition A given that B is true should be handled there.


mcv.
-- 
Science is not the be-all and end-all of human existence. It's a tool.
A very powerful tool, but not the only tool. And if only that which
could be verified scientifically was considered real, then nearly all
of human experience would be not-real.                  -- Zachriel