In an area of infinite time, infinite space, infinite matter & energy; are all odds 50/50?
I always genuinely belived this. However this morning I start to qestion it.
After an event from from when I was 7 years old, I was routinely sent to, and interviewed by different psychiatrists, and psychologists. I did allot of checklists and tests. When it came to odds or chances I always gave the same answer; 50/50 or 50%. The same wen't for written tests in school, its one of the things that created enough friction to end my schooling early.
I'm suspecting now that it might be incorrect. What are the thoughts on this among all of you?
After an event from from when I was 7 years old, I was routinely sent to, and interviewed by different psychiatrists, and psychologists. I did allot of checklists and tests. When it came to odds or chances I always gave the same answer; 50/50 or 50%. The same wen't for written tests in school, its one of the things that created enough friction to end my schooling early.
I'm suspecting now that it might be incorrect. What are the thoughts on this among all of you?
Comments (60)
Or that a one in 1million, 1billion, or 1trillion year winning streak dosen't happen to me.
So over an infinite amount of time, do you think there is a chance I might adopt a poor diet and as a result become overweight?
I do not know when exactly I took this stance, but yes. I think of it this way; in the bigger picture, considering an infinite time span, infinite space, matter & energy; a being somewhere could win a in gambling every single time it plays(lets say several times a day) for 90 years of its 100 year life. Thats event is a possibility.
When an event happens infinite times,
There's no problem.
It most certainly is, but where do you get the 50/50 from? The odds of that happening are 100%, not 50%.
You can't use use empty variables to explain everything, they have to be framed in context.
Quoting tim wood
Well, I mean the odds of it happening at any given time, in any given place. Would be 50/50 right? In infinite space there is unlimited potential for something to reach out and intervene.
It dosen't matter how long your life is, its matters how long things have been going, how long the omniverses life span is(infinite in this case).
Why on Earth would it be 50/50?
No, if you throw a die the odds of getting 1 are at any given time and in any given place 1/6.
Quoting XanderTheGrey
How long the life is does matter in this case. How long the lifespan of omniverse is is irrelevant to any case. One of the most basic rules of probability is that the history of events does not change the odds of any outcome.
Quoting noAxioms
Well if the odds are not 50/50, then what are they? You might say we would have to calculate the odds by examining all things that could effect the outcome of the situation; even things that manipulate time and space, and in this case the things that could effect the situation to go in any direction or arive at any outcome are infinite.
This assumes that space and time are not manipulated.
Quoting BlurBanana
The history of events is used to calculate the odds in some cases is it not?
Are they? Where does this assumption come from?
What are the odds of throwing a tails with a coin twice in the row?
Ofcourse I would say 50/50.
There is a very difficult slight in the underground legerdemain called "flippant technique"(not to be confused with the card slight or flourish). It takes anywhere from 5-15 years to master, and its purely a technique of control, so there is no way to classify it as cheating. I don't know if there even is an official world record, but I've seen a 72 year old male prestidigitator flip my silver morgan to tails 54 times in a row landing it on a card table(heads is slightly harder to flip to.), but I've seen that achived at 33 times in a row by the same man. It suspected there is only a few thousand people on earth who have masterd flippant technique, it was created in the 1970's soppousedly, making it the longest kept underground move I know of in the legerdemain.
How would you calculate the odds with this man involved? To me it would still be 50/50.
What are the odds that the Cubs win the last world Series? Point of view matters a lot in answering a question like that, hence my asking for a problem definition, but I cannot think of a way to word it where the odds work out to 50/50.
Odds calculations are usually an epistemological issue. In the case of a poker hand, the presumption is that the order of the cards in the deck is sufficiently unknown as to be considered functionally random.
Is your argument that because the're are too many factors or the problem is too hard to calculate, we're to assume 50/50 odds?
Tell me this, what are the odds of the first coin being tails and the second coin being tails, then?
Yes, or no. I'm saying the factors are infinite, and that should work out the odds to 50/50, right?
Let say the odds of getting a winning poker hand are 1/5 becuase there are 5 players. You are only calculating the odds based on limited factors. But in reality the factors are not limited, you could be a mark, and recive a baited hand. Or everything at the table could be fair, and there are duplicate or even triplicate cards in the deck from the factory(cards are made in sheets so likely it would have to be purposefully done by a worker just to cuase possible mayhem). Someone cloud suffer a brain aneurysm and die.
Likely you will calculate odds based on the number of players alone yes? You wouldnt factor in the odds of soneone at the table spontaniously dying from an aneurysm. And I might do the same with confidence, but that dosen't make 1/5 the true odds, the odds of you winning are still 50/50, "you will either win, or you won't".
Quoting BlueBanana
Already said, considering this hypothesis; the odds are 50/50.
Quoting XanderTheGrey
I would, but all the players have an equal chance of dying.
Quoting XanderTheGrey
If everyone has 50/50 chance of winning, on average there are 2,5 winners each game.
Also, address my example of your suicide.
The same reason anyone gambles. If you must play a game of roulette, and you have a choice between red and black on the roulette table, and your chances of hitting black are equal to your chances of hitting red, why choose one over the other?
It's a matter of preference perhaps..... lets say I simply "prefer" red over black becuase it give me a better feeling when I think of it.
There are two handguns here, a .380, and a 9x19mm, if the chances of me dying instantly are the same with either, why would I choose the more powerful 9x19mm? Maybe because it feels more comfortable in my hand, or maybe I'm under the impression that it is more likely to kill me. Would that make it more likely to kill me?
You've studied more about probability than me, but from a personal prespective your chances of wining any given hand or game are still 50/50 are they not? You will either win or you won't.
Quoting BlueBanana
I have not studied probabilistic mathematics at all, it always excited me to learn however. I've worked with odds calculations in underground poker, and some basic card counting, thats it.
Or maybe you know very well that you're very likely to die if you shoot yourself.
Quoting XanderTheGrey
If the chances of getting a tails is 50/50 and you throw 10000 coins, there'll probably be ~5000 tails. If there's 50/50 chance of getting 10000 tails in the row, there's 0,5 chances that you're getting 10000 tails instead. Now repeat this test enough times, let's say 10000. You now have 100 000 000 coins, 50 000 000 of which are tails from the tests where you got 10000 tails in the row. You see how the math isn't just adding up?
I might belive or fear that, but I don't "know". The entire human race could be in a streak of chance in which probabilistic mathematics happens to work, is that fair to say?
Regardless of what I believe, I have always been tempted to play with probabilistic mathematics.
You are gonna have to drop that thoughtless 50/50 notion.
Also, I entirety encourage everyone to learn more math.
50/50...
Perhaps someone would offer a proof. :chin:
Edit, oh comment was removed. Feel free to remove this comment too.
Or necrophiliac, he just got banned so maybe the moderators caught him in the act.
IP060903? or jgill?
IP060903 is the one I referred to.
It seemed to utterly contradict what I defined as randomness. Add chaos to chaos and it starts getting more and more ordered? It felt like randomness was this feral beast that could suddenly be tamed by statistics. A paradigm shift.
I still do not know if uniform distrubutions are real randomness or if real randomness (as I thought of it) even exist.
Perhaps there was similar thinking behind the 50/50 guy, 6 years too late to ask though.
50%, it either happens or it doesn't.
Quoting mentos987
You mean a normal distribution aka bell curve?
A bell curve is one type of uniform distribution, yes.
The interesting thing is that the distribution gets more uniform the more random events you add to it. Randomness is going towards order. This seemed very unintuitive to me when I was in school.
Example?
A coin flip is random, yet its uniform distribution is 50% heads and 50% tails.
If you flip it once the results will be extreme, it will be either 100% tails or 100% heads.
If you flip it ten times the results will move towards 50/50 but it is unlikely to reach that, a 60/40 distribution is about as likely.
If you flip them 10000 times you will find that you are almost always within 1% of 50/50.
The more coin tosses you perform the closer you will get to the uniform distribution.
Randomness itself seems to vanish the more of it you have. A disappearing act of statistics.
Maybe you can shed some light as to why massed randomness seems so ordered.
Edit: I flagged your comment above, I don't know what that does or how to undo it. Sorry
The Central Limit Theorem may be what you are talking about, although this ancient thread goes all over the place.The CLT concerns arithmetic averages of n observations as the value of n goes to infinity.
This thread might also involve the notion that in an infinite period of time all things that are possible will occur. That's pretty vague.
I haven't used probability theory in over thirty years. @fdrake is more knowledgeable.
"the average of the results obtained from a large number of independent and identical random samples converges to the true value, if it exists."
Thank you jgill
I like the idea though. Sounds like the sort of thing you'd hear in pre-Socratic philosophy; those Greeks loved their "simple but counterintuitive," lines. Of course, you'd have to frame it in good verse for it to carry much weight with them.