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0 pointsDylan168073mo ago0 comments

> A million dots scattered randomly over a graph can all land on the exact same coordinate if it’s truly random.

It won't happen though. 0.00000000% chance it happens even once in a trillion attempts.

> What most people intuit as random is some sort of noise function that is generally dispersed and doesn’t trigger the pattern matching part of their brain

Yes, people intuit the texture of random wrong in a situation where most buckets are empty. But when you have orders of magnitude more events than buckets, that effect doesn't apply. You get pretty even results that people expect.

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lovich3mo ago

> It won't happen though. 0.00000000% chance it happens even once in a trillion attempts.

It has the same odds as any other specific configuration of randomly assigned dots. The overly active human pattern matching behavior is the only reason it would be treated as special.

coldtea3mo ago

>It has the same odds as any other specific configuration of randomly assigned dots

Which doesn't change anything in practice, since it having "the same odds as any other specific configuration" ignores the fact that more scattered configurations are still far more numerous than it (or even from ones with more visual order in general) taken all together.

>The overly active human pattern matching behavior is the only reason it would be treated as special.

Nope, it's also the fact that it is ONE configuration, whereas all the rest are much much larger number. That's enough to make this specific configuration ultra rare in comparison (since we don't compare it to each other but to all others put together).

lovich3mo ago

> >It has the same odds as any other specific configuration of randomly assigned dots

> Nope, it's also the fact that it is ONE configuration, whereas all the rest are much much larger number.

That is the human pattern overactive pattern matching at play. I compared the single configuration of all dots on one location to any other specific configuration. You are not comparing to to _every other configuration_ because they are not the same

You are assigning specific importance to a single valid set of randomly selected data, because it seems significant to our brains.

If I asked you to give me an array of 1 million items containing an x, and y coordinate, what are the odds that any single specific set of items are returned?

Based on your answer to that, what are the odds for a set being return with all the same exact x and y coordinates, and a set with different x, and y coordinates?

if you answer anything other than it being the same chance, then you either don't think the selection mechanism is random, or you are falling to the standard fallacies around randomness

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FartinMowler3mo ago

Lol, reminds me of a story: at his workplace my brother was invited to join a lottery ticket pool where each got to pick the numbers for a ticket. The numbers he picked were 1-2-3-4-5-6. Although the others, mostly fellow engineers, reluctantly agreed his numbers were as likely as the others, after a couple of weeks they neglected to invite him again.

Dylan16807OP3mo ago

Entropy says it's special. If you have a million dots and 10,000 coordinates, you have 10,000 ways for all the dots to land in the same coordinate, and a zillion kavillion stupillion ways to have somewhere near 100 dots in each coordinate.

lovich3mo ago

No, if its randomly distributed then every specific configuration has the same exact chance of happening.

I am laughing at all the people coming out of the woodwork to reply to my original post in this thread misunderstanding randomness and chance.

If you flip a coin a million times and it lands on head every single time, the millionth and 1 time still has a 50/50 chance of landing on heads

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lovich3mo ago

> It won't happen though. 0.00000000% chance it happens even once in a trillion attempts.

It has the same odds as any other specific configuration of randomly assigned dots. The overly active human pattern matching behavior is the only reason it would be treated as special.

coldtea3mo ago

>It has the same odds as any other specific configuration of randomly assigned dots

>The overly active human pattern matching behavior is the only reason it would be treated as special.

lovich3mo ago

> >It has the same odds as any other specific configuration of randomly assigned dots

> Nope, it's also the fact that it is ONE configuration, whereas all the rest are much much larger number.

You are assigning specific importance to a single valid set of randomly selected data, because it seems significant to our brains.

If I asked you to give me an array of 1 million items containing an x, and y coordinate, what are the odds that any single specific set of items are returned?

Based on your answer to that, what are the odds for a set being return with all the same exact x and y coordinates, and a set with different x, and y coordinates?

if you answer anything other than it being the same chance, then you either don't think the selection mechanism is random, or you are falling to the standard fallacies around randomness

1 more reply

FartinMowler3mo ago

Dylan16807OP3mo ago

lovich3mo ago

No, if its randomly distributed then every specific configuration has the same exact chance of happening.

I am laughing at all the people coming out of the woodwork to reply to my original post in this thread misunderstanding randomness and chance.

If you flip a coin a million times and it lands on head every single time, the millionth and 1 time still has a 50/50 chance of landing on heads

2 more replies

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse