Re: >H `light barrier'

[bill@iglobal.net]

Transhuman Mailing List

> the 'science' of statistics finds its refutation every other week.
> [eg. the new york state lottery winner 2 weeks in a row .... there were
> more zeros in that one than there were allegedly particles in the universe]

When I was a teenager, a very good friend and I were standing in a church 
parking lot absently bouncing tennis balls off of the back wall of the church's 
gymnasium while talking.  I don't recall the topic of the conversation, but at 
one point, his tennis ball bounced off the wall at a sharp angle, probably 
having hit one of the joints between the cinder blocks, and intercepted my 
tennis ball in mid air, preventing it from reaching the wall.  We both found 
this unintended event mildly humorous, and he commented on how 
extraordinarily unlikely it was that the balls would just happen to have come 
together in the same time and place like that.  Thinking about this led me to 
one of those moments of insight that has shaped my thinking ever since.  
Considering the sequence of events that led to us being there tossing tennis 
balls in the first place, and the events leading up to even our existence, this 
event was incredibly unlikely.  But there it was.  Then I realized that the 
particular combination of paths that the tennis balls had taken on previous 
throws were just as unlikely as this one, but just didn't have anything special 
to make them stand out in our minds.  Indeed, EVERYTHING that ever 
happens to anyone, no matter how mundane it seems, happens against 
astronomical odds.  I've never seen the world quite the same way since 
then.  And no longer read undeserved significance into unlikely 
occurrences.  With all the incredibly unlikely events that we experience, that 
a few of them turn out to be interesting is inevitable.  If person A wins the 
lottery one week, and person B wins it the next, that specific sequence of 
events is just as unlikely as person A winning it twice in a row.  Looking at 
lotteries in isolation, this still would seem rather extraordinary.  But 
considering it in the bigger context of all of human experience, and 
considering that it's just one of a great many interesting combinations that 
could occur, it doesn't seem so remarkable.  This makes possible our very 
interesting, and sometimes very strange, universe.  And the 'science' of 
statistics, is doing just fine.


---
                                        Peace,
                                        William Kitchen
                                        bill@iglobal.net

The future is ours to create.
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