Help with probability

Are you implying as with Ramoss's silly example, that I am invoking affirmation of the consequent because of some mildly interesting provisional calculation I came up with, even after the incessant disclaimers I littered this topic with?I assume you couldn't find any errors in my post so chose to poke fun?Did you mean that 1 in 900 is the "edge of significance?" I can only assume you give that figure more validity than I do.It's not that something 1 in 900 can't happen by chance, it's just that by your own reasonings earlier on, you would not likely believe it would happen, to you. You should have noticed the difference as you claim knowledge of probability.The problem with statistics, is you can indulge in equivocation, that you haven't noticed this means that alarm-bells go off in my own mind, am I talking to someone who is only parroting what they have learnt? What about critical thinking?I shall give an example of equivocation" What did you say, that I shouldn't play the lottery? Why that's silly to say I can't win, you have to be in it to win it, and people win it all of the time! Hundreds of people, even thousands, have won the lottery? "This is equivocation because it CONFLATES two statistics.1. The probability of a particular individual winning the lottery.
2. The probability of an individual winning the lottery.With a particular individual, it's nearly 1 in 14, million, which is what is logically relevant. With "someone" winning, the mathematics change, you divide the near 14 million combinations by how many lines of the lottery were played. So if there are 300, 000 lines played, that is 300,000 attempts at the same line of six numbers, which is 1 in 46.6.1 in 14 million is not NEGATED by a 1 in 46.6 chance of "someone" winning.Therefore to tell mikey that, "1 in 900 is the statistical edge" would be equivocation, because you would be focusing on something that is not relevant to MY CHANCES, which do not change, they are still 1 in 900. Think about it, if you give the maths, you still have to extrapolate the macro-sum.So you could argue:"1 in 900? I know 70 million people that hit that sum" But mathematically, you would have to include all of the people that do "not" hit that sum, so the chances would still come out as 1 in 900.Example. We asked 100 people to guess a number between 1 and 100. One of them guessed it. We then asked another 100 people to guess the same, and one of them guessed it, which is 2 in 200, which is 1 in 100.THINK about it, it wouldn't matter if you told me that millions of people since time began, have guessed that number, because that would just mean that 99% more, haven't guessed it. This is why statistics are often mi-used by politicians.Nevertheless, would you believe having about five goes at someone's pin-number- debit card at a cash machine, would be worth it, Modulous, because many have guessed it? I read someone say, "at 1 in 3,000, why bother?" (paraphrase).The banks are happy with a 1 in 10,000 probability for pin-numbers because of the "particular chance for the particular individual".It's not really about statistics like you think it is. You are just parroting what you've learnt. You need to take part in critical thinking, and so by mentioning statistics and the science, this is a neat way of the misotheist taking part in some neat little attempt at propaganda, and making the theist look silly, acting smugly, going for the easy way out.So we can state, logically, the following:" Someone will likely win the lottery, but only because millions are playing it. " The chances of someone winning the lottery aren't all that bad, but the chances of YOU winning the lottery, are awfully bad.So there is an implied, equivocation when you mention statistics. If you are saying, "statistically, 1 in 900 always happens", you would be DEAD WRONG, despite your smug attitude as a misotheist. Logically it would be a moot-point to say, "it happens all the time", because it "does not happen all the time" much more than it does.We could go around and pick everyone that "got" the 1 in 900 outcome, but that wouldn't matter as a statistic, when balanced by the people that "did not" get the outcome. You still come to a figure of 1 in 900.So to play down the significance of the odds, when you wouldn't play them down when attempting to steal someone's pin, means that you have a motive to play down the probability.You compare omnipotence to this probability, in order to MAGNIFY omnipotence. A transparent tactic, and predictable for misotheists to commit such fallacies.Have you not realized that the percentage of the "chance" is not going down much even though the odds are going down?Example: Try once someone's pin, that's 1 in 10,000. Try twice, that's 1 in 5,000. BUT the percentage has hardly changed! It's still less than 1% of a chance whether you try a pin-number once, or try it twenty times. This is why the banks are happy for you to try all day, even if you come down to as low as 1 in 100, but as the probability-figure decreases rapidly with each try, this is an illusion, you will have to have hundreds and thousands of attempts, because the percentage is hardly changing at all.Twenty times would be 1 in 500, but still less than 1% of a chance of guessing it. So 1 in 900 is significant, statistics are not. the mathematics are more important than toying with statistics, like with the childish cartoon.Play the fool if you want, smug misotheists are ten a penny, and I come across them every week of my life. They do a brilliant job of convincing me that I would never want to be anything like them.BUT, I have punished you for this injustice, because the folly belongs to you in your attempt to;1. Strawman the "omnipotence" epithet.
2. Make out statistics are all that count, and "play down" the significance of the probability-figure.
3. Be indolent, and not recognize that I made an intelligent post, and go for the easy-tactic of making the Christian look foolish.Give yourself a big clap on the back.

Wow, I see you got a "kudos" from Modulous for posting a link to a silly cartoon that stereotypes Christians and religious people. You basically see everyone who is not like you this way, I guess.I suspect that means I would have to win the Nobel Prize before posting anything "worthy". RoFL. I suspect if Dr A or some popular evolutionist air-head had written my posts, they'd be up for post-of-the-year. It should be noted that sure, I will agree a lot of Christians and religious people, might claim stupid things, (as do atheists, such as abiogenesis, for example, or an unparsimonious multi-universe) because they are only human, but I myself wouldn't claim I have proved God's omnipotence because He has answered my prayer, because that would be to affirm the consequent as opposed to confirming the antecedant.Thus we could say,"If there is an earth-like planet, THEN we would expect a sun(star)"To then say, "there is a star, so there will be an earth-like planet" would be silly., but instead we confirm there is something, "in favour" of an earth-like planet.With prayer, generally we don't claim answered prayer proves God's omnipotence, this would be a strawman, what we atually claim is that a finely-tuned universe, with a precondition if intelligibility and a whole host of incredible organisms, and processes such as abscission and photosynthesis, provide at the very least, teleological reasons for believing God does indeed have omnipotence, if that term is to have some definite meaning of some sort.When, "superb-coincidences" happen to us occasionally, this might be explainable, but there is no reason for them to incessantly happen to a particular individual, yet they do. In this topic, I only chosen one event that happened to me, because I could multiply three consecutive events, I am not sure I am validly able to multiply all of them, but to remember them all is impossible, they happen all of the time, there is no point in even bothering.I hope you at least read something I have ACTUALLY said, rather than focusing on the one unworthy content-less post that one misotheist spammed the thread with for his own political reasons.

No. I've given you my views on that previously in the thread. No. My post was maintaining humour regarding on how the discussion had subsequently turned with Dr A and yourself. I mean a 0.1% occurrence is not remarkable. Turning water into wine, on the other hand, would be rarer than 0.1% and would be remarkable. Looking for significance in something as banal as a 1 in a 1000 shot is a fool's errand. Not so, I've won money as a result of events that had a mathematical probability of less than 1 in a 1000 on numerous occasions. I once had a friend call the top 4 cards off a deck of cards I had shuffled in another room and he called them all without looking at the deck. It's a fun story, at best, exactly as I advised you to take this to be earlier. Obviously, they are different statistics. But if someone thought it was significant that they matched 4 numbers on the 48/6 lottery I'll just shrug my shoulders and say it is not significant (obviously the money is not insignificant (sometimes it is, unfortunately), but that it means nothing important that they were the ones that won it). You're being an asshole. A wrong asshole too. You came here for help with a fundamental question on probability, I provided that help and now you think you can lecture me on probability? Hah! My view is that 1 in 900 shots are not interesting. The news does not bother reporting 1 in 900 shots most of the time because they are so common.And fuck you with your mudslinging 'smug' and 'misotheist': you're being a capital prick, sir, to a man who may disagree but maintains politeness to you so commonly. Clearly I have issued a personal wound for you to lash out with such insolence. Grow up or GTFO. They are rarer than arrogant slur-using theists, I've tons of them in my collection. Wanna do swapsies?But since you want to start randomly making things up to call people, I guess that makes you a paedophile, right? Or do you have some evidence that I hate any deity that you neglected to put forwards? You can think it significant if you like. But it's nothing compared with waking on water. It's not even close to the odds of some of the things I've seen at the poker table. Good luck calculating the significance, incidentally, without recourse to statistics. I'm being punished? How, by being lectured to on a subject I was confirming the fundamentals to you just a month ago? By having you become acerbic and discourteous? By having you slur me by calling me 'smug', 'common' and using the shitty rhetoric of 'you hate god'?Because really, there is only one possible folly I've seen in this thread. I've done no such thing. If I was going to talk about omnipotence you'd know because I'd probably dedicate a paragraph or two to exactly what I mean by it and how other meanings may affect my argument.At best I've agreed with Dr A's assessment that whatever level of potency God is claimed to have it often includes:the Power to create everything with trivial investment of effort, manifest as human and perform various highly improbable feats like walking on water, feeding thousands, curing diseases by will, commanding animals, not eating or drinking for a month, turning water into wine etc.Given that he has this much power (and those that merely believe can move mountains and drink poison with impunity), it is strange that people go looking for him to do the things that could happen without his intercession like win a sports game, open a book to a certain page, heal a skin problem, survive a plane crash etc.If I survived a plane crash and the odds were calculated for my survival as 1 in 10,000 (somehow), I would still not regard that as 'miraculous' even if plenty of people would. So what is the significance of the probability figure? I say it means nothing. That it isn't just special because it happened to you while in a religious context. What do you say? If you look foolish, it is not my doing.Since you decided to arrogantly declare that you made an intelligent post, allow me to comment: it wasn't. It wasn't wrong, it was just an unnecessarily verbose way of getting to your point.Mike you have choices here:1) Say that God was not involved in getting you to the right Bible pages.
2) Say that God was manifesting himself in a way that is statistically meaningless and tells nobody anything about his existence or his desires.I thought you preferred point 1, personally. But I quoted Russell's Teapot as a tie-in between your thread about prayer with Dr A and your thread about the probability of a certain event.If you are of point 1, however, you'd have found the notion that God manifests himself in such trivial manners as laughable as I do. Which leads me think that you actually believe 2), and are upset that this attitude was being mocked. Generally, people are more complex that dichotomies, so what do you say?

No he got a 'thank you' from me in the form of a kudos for providing the original source material for the quote I posted because I wasn't able to find it. But nevertheless, if you wanted to test the hypothesis that your unlikely event was the result of you being 'on a roll with God', you'd engage in riskier testing. That is: You'd find something that you would agree was within God's power, that could not be attributable to chance.For instance, for less than $50 you could probably get your own custom version of the Bible printed off. Randomize the chapters of the Bible so they all appear (complete) but in random order. Add it to a pdf or something, then get it printed as a one copy book. Then see how you do, maybe even have program generate random Bible Chapters and see if you can arbitrarily turn to them. Just as an example that doesn't involve God shaking up the social order in one swoop. Yes. Except your empirical observation that Yes they do. Any given 1 in a 1000 shot will only happen 1 in a 1000 times. But there are countless 1 in a 1000 shot opportunities that could happen all the time some of them do and sometimes they get noticed. The failures almost never do. Did you notice that the guy that served you coffee yesterday was not the homeless guy you bought a coffee for ten years ago? What if it was, and you realized it, suddenly its a big deal, even though the bus driver was a complete stranger and you omit all similar data.

Incidentally, I should point out that this isn't quite correct. There are two errors in this. There is a general issue that follows which impacts your results:1) What is the probability you would get it within 30 openings? 100%? No. Using a binomial calculator I get a probability that you would get it at least once in four trials as being approximately 12 2/3% (your calculation is 13 1/3%). But this assumes you declared ahead of time you were taking four trials.2) In opening the book and getting another trial, you ensure that your trials are not independent - since you can potentially infer if you opened the book early or late and use that knowledge in subsequent trials. This turns it from a random search algorithm to a binary search algorithm that depends on your finger skills but definitely impacts the probability (typically making it more probable)There is another issue which is considering how many different combinations would you have counted as a 'hit' in terms of being interestingly improbable. It gets tricky here too. There are four combinations I can think of that produce close to 1 in 1000 if we are keeping our calculations simple (eg., Numbers in 2, Habbukkah in two. Numbers in 3, Habbukka in 1 etc), but can we do that? Let's assume, for instance, that you took in principle, four trials in each occasion - only in practice you stopped at any point where you were successful. There are 12 theoretical trials, but not each combination of total success is equally impressive. You can see how the probabilities here may be quite different than if we assume you have three 'retries' over all three books (where there can be 3-6 trials).And of course, since you probably didn't define which ruleset you were going to follow ahead of time, we have to take that into account, which (along with the trials not being fully independent anyway) ultimately renders finding any meaning out of a deep analysis of the numbers impossible.But you know, it's a fun story, I'm sure your fellow church-goers will get a kick out of it if they tolerate the method in general.

Using the term 'asshole' and 'capital prick' in a disparaging fashion is bad.Disparaging a member of EvC forum. Verboten.Cease desist, and I would suggest, apologize or suspensions may well follow.

Mod,You cannot count the errors in Mike's calculation because there was absolutely nothing about what he posted that was correct other than the fact you can often use division as a step in calculating a probability. "You always divide?" Really? But he said nothing correct about what you would divide.Even if you were guaranteed to find the right section in thirty attempts, dividing 4 shots by 30 would be totally crapticious.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

In the context of a coin toss taken from wikiprobability of 20 heads, then 1 tail = 0.520 0.5 = 0.521
probability of 20 heads, then 1 head = 0.520 0.5 = 0.521The probability of the result of an individual toss remains equal but the probability of a lengthing string of all heads must drop with each toss if the probability of each toss is to remain equal.Doesn't the string of all heads have any impact on the probability of the next toss?

No. Coins have no memory.If they did, you'd have a neat way of cheating at heads-or-tails. Keep tossing a coin until you hit a run of, let us say 6 heads. Now the coin is primed to come down tails, and you can carry it around until you meet someone who's prepared to bet it'll come down heads at even odds. (If he wants to bet on tails, carry a different coin in another pocket.)

I did say that I understand that the probability of each toss remains equal but are 10 heads in a row not more probable than 20 heads in a row? Where does this probability come from if not from some relationship with the equal probability of the individual results?Doesn't the 50% probability of heads on each toss impact the probability of a string of 20 heads?

Well, yes. The probability of getting n heads in a row is 0.5ⁿ. This is smaller when n is bigger.But when you've just had 10 heads in a row, the probability of getting another 10 heads in a row is the probability of getting 10 heads in a row. Since the coin has no memory, it doesn't know that that'll add up to 20 heads in a row and that that's much more unlikely.

How can the probability of the second 10 heads be the same as the probability of the first 10 if the probability is falling as n increases? Either the coin does have a memory (which I think we both agree that it does not) or the probability is not actually getting smaller as n increases.

Think of it this way. Once you've got 10 heads in a row making it to 20 is much more likely than it was before you started - because you're already half-way.You don't count the probability of the part that has already been done, because it's already done.Does that help ?

Because the first 10 have already happened.Look at it this way. Suppose I asked you your chances of rolling a 6 on a dice. You'd say 1/6, wouldn't you? You wouldn't start saying: "Well, to begin with, the chances of that particular sperm fertilizing my mother's egg was a billion to one, then every time I've been in a car I've had a 1/10,000 chance of dying ..." and so forth, and end up calculating your chances as being a zillion to one against. Yes, shortly before your conception the chances of you rolling a six may have been a zillion to one against, but most of the really unlikely things have already happened. Now you've just got to roll the 6. You have a 1/6 chance of doing so.

Did the exponential notation get lost when this was cloned into the post? should be 0.5^20 x 0.5 = 0.5^21 = 1/2097152 = approx. 0.000000477because .521 is WAY WRONG.