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To: 2ndDivisionVet
The likelihood of any known potentially hazardous asteroid striking the planet within the next 100 years stands at 0.01% Statistics are a funny thing and often misleading. They always give the statistic for a certain period, but asteroid strike probabilities are not the same as the roulette wheel. Presuming that their is an asteroid out there with our name on it, every passing moment without an asteroid strike increases the odds that it will occur in the next moment. In short, you can land on the same number again in normal roulette, but you cannot land on the same year again asteroid roulette.
13 posted on 08/23/2015 4:07:13 AM PDT by SampleMan (Feral Humans are the refuse of socialism.)
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To: SampleMan

I think you are engaging in the gambler’s fallacy fallacy. The well known gambler’s fallacy is to believe that past events influence later (supposedly) independent events. A run of “rouge” on a fair roulette wheel does not indicate that “noir” is “due”. But a long sequence of “rouge” does call into question whether or not the wheel is actually fair. Bayes would understand.

If you are waiting for a bus on a scheduled route, as each minute passes, it would seem increasingly likely that one would come in the next minute as the scheduling is designed to spread the arrival of buses a more or less uniform intervals, and that assumption is reason. It is based on knowledge of the state of system.

One the other hand, if one is counting decay products of a mass of radioactive material with a Geiger counter, one expects “statistically” (more accurately: “probabilistically”) a certain number of hits per unit time, on average. But the occurrence of hits is completely random, unlike the bus, one can have several hits in one five minute interval, and none in another five minute interval. The count in one interval has no effect on the count in next (assuming the observation interval is a small fraction of the half life).

The gambler’s fallacy is akin to likening the occurrence of “rouge” or “noir” (or heads or tails) to the arrival of scheduled events, when they are (given fair wheels or coins) independent, like the decay of a radioactive isotope. The gambler assumes knowledge of the state of the system which does not exist. I think you are making the same assumption. There may well be asteroids out there on predictable trajectories will hit in 100 or 1000 or a million years. But we lack any knowledge of their current state, or even about their existence.


23 posted on 08/23/2015 5:34:02 AM PDT by Lonesome in Massachussets (Men need a reason to shop. Women need a place.)
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