From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lee@piclab.com)
Date: Tue Apr 29 2003 - 01:17:46 MDT
> (Samantha Atkins <samantha@objectent.com>):
>
> The argument is utterly flawed. There is no such thing as a
> human picked at random from all those that will ever be in all
> time when the choosing is done *at a particular point in time*.
> At that particular point by definition one can only pick a
> human alive at that time. Therefore talking about the
> probability of what time the supposed random sample came from
> relative to what cannot be sampled at all (the complete set of
> all past, present, future humans) is bogus.
It's a lot more subtle than that: There's nothing at all wrong
with picking a sample from items spread out in time, even into
the future. For example, one can certainly reason meaningfully about
a random sample of best actor oscar winners from 1950 to 2050.
Even random samples from infinite sets can be defined in
mathematically useful ways. The problem is (1) picking from an
presumably bounded, but unspecified, range (from big bang to some
unspecified point in the future), and (2) using that as a premise
for arguing about what that future bound is.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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