From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Tue Apr 29 2003 - 09:47:24 MDT
Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
>>(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.
Not in the matter of the DA one can't.
> 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.
>
Exactly.
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