It's seriously not as intuitive as it seems. High school probability is, but there are some pretty interesting concepts later on. I'm writing this because it's a genuinely interesting topic to me, and I hope most people who read this think so too =p
Instead of talking about the chance of life forming spontaneously (sorry Ash hehe), let's talk about a lottery (since gambling is more my thing). Say there are two ways to win a lottery. One is by cheating, and one is by winning honestly. Winning the lottery honestly has a low probability - only 0.0001%. Let's say I buy a ticket and win the lottery honestly.
Then someone from the company comes up to me and says, dude, no way. There's a 0.0001% chance you won honestly, and therefore 99.9999% chance you cheated, so man, we're taking you to court and you're going to get convicted and do some serious time. Argument in court then goes as follows -> chance of winning is 0.0001% therefore my probability of being innocent is 0.0001%
Whoa. Hold your horses. The comparison is clearly illogical, and unfair. We do have other things to take into account - like, the fact that cheaters who win lotteries are more rare than honest winners in the first place.
This is the main reason why the following creationism argument is false : it is argued that there's a 0.0000000001% chance that life formed spontaneously, then therefore there's a 99.9999999999% chance that God created life and therefore the overwhelming evidence is that God created life. It sounds reasonable here, but utterly false in the case of the lottery argument.
This demonstrates an important fact about probability -> it's probably the easiest branch of mathematics to make mistakes in because sometimes it is very counter-intuitive. I think I may have discussed the Monty Hall paradox before on this blog : well I feel like doing so again because it's simply so cool.
I was exposed to it as part of an assignment at university and it took me a week or much arguing and thinking to finally admit I was wrong. Of course I blame this mistake due to me still being in first year -> only in second year maths did we fully cover Bayesian theory =p Excuses aside, luckily I managed to understand it before the due date of the assignment and scored full marks for it =p
So, next post : the Monty Hall Paradox.
9 comments:
hmmm... could I point out a flaw in your argument?
For one there is a 0.00001% chance that you get the winning ticket. However, you released 10000000 tickets (hope that;s the right number of zeroes). Making the chance some one won 100%. Therefore there will be a winner.
Now, if I only sold one ticket. What are the chances he was lucky? And conversely what are the chances he broke the system?
I guess then the problem with creation is how many tickets did we sell? Thus we argue about the length of time the universe existed and the probabilities involved for life to occur. Insofar as I can tell the facts point to a truly great potential that the lottery was rigged.
It's like that pocketwatch in the desert explanation. Either it came out of the sand or someone made it. And I reiterate, following the lines that anything with a small amount of probability should be used as a backing, then maybe your mom isn't your mom after all.
*shrug* and no one thus can say the Creation theory is unacceptable because I have a better percentage probability than you. :P
I think I better write a summary post
here is an example why your explanation is flawed. like I said we know we won the lottery. how many tickets did we sell?
http://www.fourmilab.ch/rpkp/experiments/statistics.html
ehhh, essentially you are proving me right
that it's not as simplistic as chances of life are low therefore high chance that a creator made it. that there's much more to it than that.
and why are you bringing in the "number of tickets sold" it's completely not relevant to this at all... very often there are no winners in lotteries anyway.
and since "number of tickets sold" is not relevant to this argument then neither is the rest of what you've said, i'm afraid.
maybe i should explain why bringing in "number of tickets sold" is not relevant ->
it's as ridiculous as this situation -> say that I am an Chinese man on trial for murder... and the prosecution says, there are damn alot of Chinese men who live in this country and surely ONE of them is guilty of murder.
(this is exactly like you saying because there are 10,000 tickets there should be at least 1 winner. eh?? true statement but completely not relevant!)
surely the trial of my innocence should not be affected if there is one Chinese man or 10,000 Chinese men in this country, same if i buy a lottery ticket it doesn't matter if only 10 were sold or 1 billion were sold... (if only 10 were sold sure the chances that there will be a "winner" would be small but it doesn't affect each personal chance of winning)
i think you are operating under the assumption that lottery companies always sell at least 1 wining ticket among all their duds, which is not true.
hmmm... no. If you sell all your tickets, then you will have one winner.
But if you don't sell all your tickets, you may not have a winner.
If you have a billion billion billion trillion gazillion ticktes, and only give out one, likelyhood is you do not have a winner.
As far as we know, there is only one universe. As far as we currently know, this universe has life and it was an outrageous probability that it shouldn't have.
In fact, your example of the Chinese man works against you. If there are a million chinese, then obviously you cannot pull out one and say he did it.
Randomness doesn't work.
Just as the universe. There were a gazitrillgigamillion chance that life didn't happen, but we just got the winning ticket. Randomness was it?
[snip]hmmm... no. If you sell all your tickets, then you will have one winner.[/snip]
that, is called a raffle...
if you want to know what a lottery is like go to any local Tatts Lotto shop and ask for advice and you will see that i am right =p
You guys don't think like lawyers/judges at all.
If that person was brought to court, as a judge the person would ask 'well, is that person guilty, or not?'. There's no mathematics, it's an either-or case. If there's a chance for him being innocent then he is innocent until the case can be made solid, and the unlikelihood of him being innocent does not warrant him being guilty.
Duh. Where does probability come into place of proving something correct or incorrect? To the mind of the non-mathematician, the 1% of winning is as significant as a 50% probability, ie. if there's a chance there's a chance.
This is why I kept fighting with my maths teacher. I remember nitpicking on the examples given that the mathematics teacher broke down and cried. People don't behave in the way the examples are provided, so why do you provide such bizarre examples then? Why not provide something realistic? From the perspective of an arguer, the person is setting up a false dichotomy.
The Creationism vs. Evolution thing is another example of an extremely flawed argument. I'll illustrate this:
Now, if I were to argue properly, I would need to know what I would be arguing about. The main premise is that Creation exists because God allowed it to be there, whereas Evolution - or whatever that replaces it - exists because it emerges out of nowhere.
Now in the very first place these are all vague concepts that can be easily shot. To the Creationist, I would pose this questions: Who is God? How does God work? - and of course, there are enough conflicting opinions among creationists themselves that will emerge from those questions. Now, I will approach the arguer for non-God and I would ask him to prove the non-involvement of God. Of course he can't do that, because God is such a vague, undefined concept that you can insert God anywhere. To use a very fallecitious analogy: you can pour warm water into a thermos flask and you can call the thermos flask God. And it works.
From the perspective of an arguer -and I am not the first person to point this out - the reason why the argument of Creationism vs. Spontaneously Existing is so messy is because there is no argument. The main issue remains: we have no idea how life came to be. Until the lines of the argument is well-defined, you only have people whacking each other without really knowing what direction they're heading or what they're whacking about. It's an argument of extremely vague semiotics.
Setting up Creationism as a large umbrella against the Evolutionist as a large umbrella is in itself a false dichotomy because in the first place this is not an either-or-case. It is not about whether there is a goat behind the door or not. It is two umbrella movements with overlapping and conflicting opinions. Therefore, setting up these two ideas as opposing concepts is a fallacy.
-
Loya Burok aka Cat.
i never wanted to bring probability into the argument about creationism vs evolution, but so many people insist on doing so.
i've argued before that it's kinda invalid to talk about probabilities like this when involving events in the past -> since probability is about predicting the future -> but there are indeed several points to be made.
for example, in court, it's admissable evidence to say that "because of such and such a thing the chance of my client being guilty is extremely unlikely" and this does involve probability, does it not?
you cannot prove anything, (since, for all you know, God himself might reach down from heaven and plant incriminating evidence? it's just unlikely). that's why we have the words to "prove beyond all reasonable doubt"
how reasonable is reasonable? if a DNA evidence has only a 1 in a million chance of matching, or a fingerprint being only 1 in a million chance of matching, then that's beyond reasonable doubt.
i'm not going to argue about creationism vs evolution - i'm just clarifying some common mistakes and assumptions about how probability works. because i know a little bit about probability and nothing about evolution. =p
Post a Comment