[hrothgar]

kenrexford, on 2013-February-06, 10:51, said:

Consider a problem. Play for the drop or hook when the odds are close? Some go the supposedly anti-percentage way and swear by it. Maybe they are right, and for them it actually is the percentage line. When you hear their explanations, they discount certain situations as not likely, and somehow this works out for them, they claim. Who are we to question this?

There is a difference between

"The other team is stronger than we are, therefore our best chance of winning is to trade off expected value for variance" and

"If I wish really hard, I can delude myself about probability theory"

[barmar]

kenrexford, on 2013-February-06, 10:51, said:

If there are an infinite number of universes, then clearly there is a universe in which I always flip heads. So, if each I assumes that I will only flip heads, one of us will be right, and many of us will be uncannily close to right. Some of us will be p'd off with the incredible bad luck.

If I can somehow control which universe I am by just deciding it is so, or at least thereby move myself in that direction, I might cause heads to pop up more than makes sense.

But how would you know if you can control it? There are some universes where every time you have said "Make it heads", it came out heads, and vice versa. But there's no way to tell whether it's cause-and-effect or just coincidence (since there are an infinite number of universes, some of them will have this correspondence).

When you postulate infinite users and all the possible laws that could operate in them, predictability goes out the window.

[fromageGB]

Glad to see you made it back safely, Ken. Some of us were worried.