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Bayesianism vs Frequentism (comic) (Original Post)
DetlefK
Jun 2016
OP
muriel_volestrangler
(101,266 posts)1. The Starship Titanic:
The legendary and gigantic Starship Titanic was a majestic and luxurious cruise liner launched from the great shipbuilding asteroid complexes of Artifactovol. It was sensationally beautiful, staggeringly huge and more pleasantly equipped than any ship in history, but it had the misfortune to be built in the very earliest days of Improbability Physics, long before this difficult and cussed branch of knowledge was fully, or at all, understood.
The designers and engineers decided, in their innocence, to build a prototype Improbability Field into it, which was meant, supposedly, to ensure that it was Infinitely Improbable that anything would ever go wrong with any part of the ship.
They did not realize that because of the quasi-reciprocal and circular nature of all Improbability calculations, anything that was Infinitely Improbable was very likely to happen almost immediately.
The Starship Titanic was a monstrously pretty sight as it lay beached like a silver Arcturan Megavoidwhale among the laser-lit tracery of its construction gantries, a brilliant cloud of pins and needles of light against the deep interstellar blackness; but when it launched, it did not even manage to complete its very first radio message an SOS before undergoing a sudden and gratuitous total existence failure.
http://hhgproject.org/entries/starshiptitanic.html
The designers and engineers decided, in their innocence, to build a prototype Improbability Field into it, which was meant, supposedly, to ensure that it was Infinitely Improbable that anything would ever go wrong with any part of the ship.
They did not realize that because of the quasi-reciprocal and circular nature of all Improbability calculations, anything that was Infinitely Improbable was very likely to happen almost immediately.
The Starship Titanic was a monstrously pretty sight as it lay beached like a silver Arcturan Megavoidwhale among the laser-lit tracery of its construction gantries, a brilliant cloud of pins and needles of light against the deep interstellar blackness; but when it launched, it did not even manage to complete its very first radio message an SOS before undergoing a sudden and gratuitous total existence failure.
http://hhgproject.org/entries/starshiptitanic.html
tk2kewl
(18,133 posts)2. this could just as easily be relevant in DU:GDP
On the Road
(20,783 posts)3. The Probability of a Ridiculous Event May Indeed Be Zero --
for example, those that violate the laws of nature.
However, the human ability to distinguish possible from impossible events is not perfect -- witness accepted laws nature that violate traditional common sense. So from a human point of view, it's still not possible to assign zero percent chance to any given statement with 100% confidence.
eppur_se_muova
(36,247 posts)4. Non sequitur in panel seven.
Totally blows the whole cartoon if you catch it.
bvf
(6,604 posts)5. Good catch.
And it indeed does.