Civil Liberties

lweiger at umich.edu lweiger at umich.edu
Thu Sep 20 08:28:07 PDT 2001


The odds making process would be the same whether you're attempting to reconstruct what previously happened or making a projection about potential future events.

-- Luke


> This is correct re the million+1 roll (or any n+1 roll). But that is
> usually the question one is asking. Here's possibly an (outlandish)
> example to illustrate the more ususal question. We have two storerooms,
> one containing one million boxes. The other contains 1000 boxes. We can
> only enter one storeroom. One in every 100 boxes contains an antibiotic
> which we need in order to survive, and we must get it within the next
> (say) one hour. We need at least three doses. Which storeroom shall we
> search, or does it make no distance? Notice that we are _Not_ predicting
> the future but dealing with an already given but unknown state of
> affairs. It doesn't make any difference what the "odds" are on the next
> box containing the medicine but on the probability of some three boxes
> containing it of all those we open in the next hour.
>
> Carrol



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