How the Internet Makes the Improbable Into the New Normal 191
Hugh Pickens writes "A burglar gets stuck in a chimney, a truck driver in a head on collision is thrown out the front window and lands on his feet, walks away; a wild antelope knocks a man off his bike; a candle at a wedding sets the bride's hair on fire; someone fishing off a backyard dock catches a huge man-size shark. Now Kevin Kelly writes that in former times these unlikely events would be private, known only as rumors, stories a friend of a friend told, easily doubted and not really believed but today they are on YouTube, seen by millions. 'Every minute a new impossible thing is uploaded to the internet and that improbable event becomes just one of hundreds of extraordinary events that we'll see or hear about today,' writes Kelly. 'As long as we are online — which is almost all day many days — we are illuminated by this compressed extraordinariness. It is the new normal.' But when the improbable dominates the archive to the point that it seems as if the library contains only the impossible, then the 'black swans' don't feel as improbable. 'To the uninformed, the increased prevalence of improbable events will make it easier to believe in impossible things,' concludes Kelly. 'A steady diet of coincidences makes it easy to believe they are more than just coincidences.'"
Even things as improbable... (Score:3, Funny)
... as the first post? ;-)
God and Star Wars (Score:5, Interesting)
Does this hail the rebirth of religion? Or perhaps the renaissance of sci-fi in 5-10 years?
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Don't think it has squat to do with either. It just means people are getting used to absurd things that we would have previously wrote off as urban legends.
I doubt anyone is going to see God, Mohammed, Buddha or Jesus on youtube without it being an obvious mockup or hoax, regardless of whether or not any of the do/did exist.
As for sci-fi... Youtube isn't going to change the fact that the hands that guide that station are a bunch of retards that like to pump out and/or watch cheap overly-formulaic "sci-fi" a
Re:God and Star Wars (Score:5, Interesting)
I doubt anyone is going to see God, Mohammed, Buddha or Jesus on youtube without it being an obvious mockup or hoax, regardless of whether or not any of the do/did exist.
It isn't about seeing them personally, but rather "look at all these miraculous events! How can you possibly claim that my particular flavor of deity does not exist?"
Re:God and Star Wars (Score:5, Interesting)
Mod Parent Insightful.
The fact that everyone and their brother has a camera at the ready these days, or, more likely, the odds that at least someone is recording live video is increasingly common.
The videos of strange events, as mentioned in the story, or a line of airplane seats coming across the highway [youtube.com] and smacking a car, just happening to get caught by a driver recording his trip with his mounted cell camera, are becoming common. As cameras become more ubiquitous, there is virtually nowhere you can go these days and NOT be near someone who has a camera.
But taking your same line of reasoning from a different direction: Why haven't we got ANY (non-faked) pictures of Big Foot yet, or Aliens landing, etc? ?
Can it be that, after a suitable period of time with a sufficient number of observers, the Absence of Evidence actually becomes Evidence of Absence? In a world where virtually every unusual event has a high probability of being photographed, can the Appeal to Ignorance [wikipedia.org] continue to be hand-waived away?
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I like the line of reasoning at the end there, but you'd need to put it in more mathematical terms. Given a n number of observers , If an event has not been observed for a time period of t, then the probability of it happening must be p.
Its pretty much what physicists do when looking for particle behaviors. Like proton decay.
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Oh, crap! ;-)
My theory can't possibly hold water till I go back to college and earn a degree in Physics.
Sheldon Cooper, is that you?
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Who is sheldon cooper? Is that one of those "There are no elephants in Denmark" things?
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Took you longer to post that than it would have taken to google it.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_distribution [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem [wikipedia.org]
the actual formulation is more like, "if the actual probability of observing a bigfoot is p>0, what is the probability of not having observed one after all this time?", and the answer is "pretty much zero" unless p is so small that the number of extant bigfeet would be below the threshold of population viability anyway.
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Can it be that, after a suitable period of time with a sufficient number of observers, the Absence of Evidence actually becomes Evidence of Absence?
Even if it doesn't, it will probably have that effect for the majority, and thus it will still kill those memes.
Re:God and Star Wars (Score:4, Informative)
I do find the study of modern urban legends fascinating. Back in the 1960's there was an urban legend that the original "Avengers" series had did some trial runs using color film reels as an experiment. Nobody ever saw or heard more about those reels for decades. They looked round all the film archives at the studio and other places, but the studio has thrown them out all those years ago. Then one day, a woman is clearing out an old shed owned by her husband when she came across some flat metal cans. She didn't know what they were, called in some studio engineers, and they identified them as those very reels.
Even in a modern computer office or lab, there will be somebody that remembers that some contractor or senior engineer did some experimental work years ago before leaving. Nobody can find the work until years later, when some old server powered down for reliability is found and powered up again.
Re:God and Star Wars (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems to me that ordinary people are finally catching up with mainstream media.
School shootings and jetliner crashes make big news, but account for an incredibly small percentage of preventable deaths. The perception is that something must change immediately to keep these things from happening so often. But few people care about, for instance, the fact that automobile crashes and abuse accounts for a large proportion of the preventable deaths for children.
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Do you realize jetliners are inspected pre and and post flight? Or that there's a lot more cars than jetliners?
There's steps that can be taken to prevent school shootings, even if it's arming the teachers...
But, car crashes and abuse? Everybody has to look only to themselves to prevent those and that'll never happen. Abuse is a dark side of human nature, car crashes are mostly coordination fails, whether sober or not. Perfect humanity and get rid of both
Columbine shootings (Score:2, Insightful)
Columbine shooting was 15 years ago. But I don't suppose you heard of them, they barely made the news.
Want to try again?
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That's exactly the point. Such a big deal was made about Columbine that it will be in everybody's mind forever (I'll bet you can still recall the names of the two shooters, but that's another problem in itself). It masks the fact that 3x as many children died in car accidents on the same day.
Had all these accidents been caused by one and the same person, I'm sure it also would have made big news.
Re:Columbine shootings (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, it would. But people are now terrified that their children are going to be gunned down in school - because "improbable is now the normal", when they really should stop using their cell phones while driving. That's a lot more likely to harm their children.
Re:Columbine shootings (Score:5, Interesting)
I doubt it. If a school bus crashes and kills 39 children then it will be very big news for a week or two, then it will be forgotten. Do you remember what happened in Yuba City?
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Do you remember what happened in Yuba City?
You mean when they blew the levee to flood olivehurst instead of yuba city? No wait, my parser says you must be talking about something else
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You mean like the Bernhard Goetz [wikipedia.org] shooting, that only made it to the front page of Time magazine?
Bernhard Goetz [wordpress.com]
Re:God and Star Wars (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know about sci-fi; but I'd be inclined to doubt any significant effect on religion.
To the degree that religions bother with making truth claims about the world, they tend to focus on a very well-honed version of the sort of "stories a friend of a friend told, easily doubted and not really believed" that TFA contrasts with the new internet-enabled transmission. You tend to see belief spread, or at least persist, by means of strong social connections(the traces of 'to tie/bind together' in the latin root of 'religion' are not by accident), emotionally intense personal experiences and group ritual union.
For the assorted, somewhat irksome, 'something vaguely in my favor happened, it's a Sign and/or My Guardian Angel Intervened' brigade, the fact that humans don't know probability from a hole in the ground(even statisticians have trouble on a gut level, and everybody else doesn't have an alternative to the gut level) probably helps spice things up; but that phenomenon doesn't seem to scale: people who have already been influenced by the very old, affectively powerful, personal methods are more likely to interpret random events as possessing meaning or representing some sort of supernormal intervention(unlike, say, a gambler who also falls prey to nonsense about 'hot streaks' or 'my number is due to come up'; but doesn't experience their shoddy grasp of probability as metaphysically invested).
If anything, broad access to the improbable would actually seem to damage traditional attitudes and beliefs about 'miracles' and the like. "It was a head-on collision on an icy road and she was thrown clear, what a miracle!" will meet "I'm glad she's ok, here are 1800 dash cams of people escaping horrible accidents without a scratch, and it looks like the American road kills about 35,000 people a year, I guess god just hates them and their families, eh?"
(Now, I don't actually expect any change, a bunch of abstract numbers and facts are so pale and lifeless in the face of emotion and experience, so I doubt that there will be any major shift from this source.)
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I wouldn't be too quick to say that no new religions would be formed, after all look at the beliefs of the Rastafarian.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rastafari_movement [wikipedia.org]
The internet, where religion comes to die (Score:3)
Thing is when you run a "Jesus camp" there will be video of your brainwashing methods all over the internet. What was previously difficult information to obtain is no
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I think you're probably a troll, but...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distraction_osteogenesis [wikipedia.org]
It's a miracle!
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I've a short counter-example. I remember a couple years ago my cousin lost a child in a tragic incident of SID. My cousin was a strong believer, as was my father, and they were both praying reverently at the funeral for the child to come back from the dead. It was the most painful and agonizing thing I think I've ever watched. There's not a person alive that could claim that it was a lack of faith, hope, or obedience on the part of those two. The only thing that was missing was an Intervener that listens
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Once it's not visible, it didn't happen.
Yes, that's correct. Your eyes are fallible. Unless you have meaningful evidence, you're not saying anything meaningful. That's how reality works. Come play with us here.
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Yeah, I know, the Fall of Man, blah blah blah. What a load of bollocks.
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I'm honestly surprised that my comment would be classified as a 'frothing-at-the-mouth atheist rant'. My point was merely that religions are perhaps the most perfected form of the 'pre-internet' information systems that TFA dismisses so casually. Thus, they are both unlikely to gain significantly from the internet(the number of people who've had an intense, emotionally affecting conversion experience; but are waiting for a statistically significant number of corroborating experiences to show up on youtube i
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The reports of religion's death have been greatly exaggerated.
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Does this hail the rebirth of religion? Or perhaps the renaissance of sci-fi in 5-10 years?
I would think it is just the opposite. Religion(s) formed prior to mass communication, the the relaying of the improbable to the masses causing a change in belief would not be in effect. Likewise, that would probably be evidence that the premise of the article is, well, improbable, too.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-21009301
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Yes and no...
The next time someone walks on water, we'll be able to record in on our cell phones and upload it for the world to see.
But most people will still think it's some Cris Angel style publicity hoax.
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Already been done:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oe3St1GgoHQ [youtube.com]
And, yes, it was a hoax (aka viral marketing).
black swans are not improbable (Score:2)
silly example, kinda brings into question the premise of the article
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They were prior to the discovery of black swans in 1697.
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FTFY.
The original Australians certainly knew about them and wouldn't have found them at all improbable. Though they might have been a bit surprised at white swans...
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Re:black swans are not improbable (Score:4, Informative)
In case that wasn't a joke and for those who didn't click the wikipedia link:
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What brings the article into question is the gratuitous labeling of a group as "uninformed".
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I agree. There have always been skeptics and gullibles. Pics or it didn't happen!
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Is it in any way impossible that a brides hair will catch on fire. Of course not. Probability says it will happen somewhere. Is it impossible in any particular persons life. If the chance is 1 in a million, and one goes to hundred weddings
Youtube is the bloopers show of the 21st Century (Score:3)
It is interesting that the age of enlightenment was about rational certainities, it is printed in black and white after all, but the information age allows an older style of open view of the world, which can only be a good thing in my humble opinion. However, there are always people doing stupid things and equally stupid people (like me) like to laugh at them.
Re:Youtube is the bloopers show of the 21st Centur (Score:4, Interesting)
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The Guinness books really have gone downhill. Now they're big "coffee table" books, and IIRC, have way less overall information than the packed paperbacks. I'm not even sure if they still have the "heaviest twins went riding on motorscooters" pictures anymore, but those you mention (and the "coffin the size of a piano case") are the ones we mention from the long ago Guinness Books of Records.
Black swan theory is pseudo-intellectual bunk (Score:2)
Or it will train people to stop believing that those coincidences are meaningful. You know, like every rare occurrence that we already know that is actually common and unrelated.
Two Nerds, One Cup of Hot Tea (Score:5, Funny)
The principle of generating small amounts of finite improbability by simply hooking the logic circuits of a Arduinopentamillenuova-5007 Sub-Microcontroller to a Markov chain generator driven by a strong RNG [lavarnd.org] (say, a nice lava lamp and a photodetector) were of course well understood - and such generators were often used to acquire a first round of venture funding by photoshopping all the pixels in the hostess's undergarments simultaneously one foot to the left, in accordance to the theory of Rule 34.
Many respectable developers said that they weren't going to stand for this, partly because Web 2.0 was a debasement of technology, but mostly because they didn't get hired by those sorts of startups.
Another thing they couldn't stand was the perpetual failure they encountered while trying to construct a machine which could generate the infinite improbability field needed to propagate a meme across the bandwidth-draining distances between the farthest minds, and at the end of the day they grumpily announced that such a machine was virtually impossible.
Then, one day, an intern who had been left to sweep up after a particularly unsuccessful startup found himself reasoning in this way: If, he thought to himself, such a machine is a virtual impossibility, it must have finite improbability. So all I have to do in order to virtualize one is to work out how exactly improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite improbability generator, give it a fresh round of really hot funding... and turn it on!
He did this and was rather startled when he managed to create the long-sought-after golden Infinite Improbability generator. He was even more startled when just after he was awarded the Y Combinator 2013 Prize for Extreme Agility, he was lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable developers who had realized that one thing they couldn't stand was a smart-ass.
I heard someone won the lottery once (Score:2)
Therefore, I will gain the power of flight.
I'm not going to argue that humans aren't good at rational analysis of probabilities - there's reams of data to show that our instincts which kept our ancestors safe in the wild actively work against us when it comes to rational, long term decisions. It also shows us that the associations we make are usually shallow and immediate. The knowledge of one improbable thing only impresses upon us that that same improbable thing is not as improbable as we once thought.
S
Apparently.. (Score:5, Interesting)
The Internet makes stupid people more stupid..
What were the odds?
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Well they were highly improbable, but the internet has changed all that.
But not always real (Score:2)
But with modern CG and video-editing, you can't just trust any video on the internet.
For example, see the recent Eagle Baby Attack [huffingtonpost.ca] video.
Sometimes the crowd is washed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Although, you could alternatively argue rather that they have a deeper understanding of humanity, since when people are anonymous, they act different than face to face.
Either way, people here seem more cynical than people in the real world. I wonder if that's causation and not just correlation.
Re:Sometimes the crowd is washed (Score:4, Insightful)
Either way, people here seem more cynical than people in the real world. I wonder if that's causation and not just correlation.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I know I was much more of an optimist before I became involved with systems administration and internet security.
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That may be true, but I'm still a bit disappointed when it doesn't happen.
The other option (Score:2)
Along those lines, news would cover the same junk that always happens. Today at 4, traffic goes past the elementary school and cats spend most of their time sleeping. For our late edition at 11, old people playing bingo and tomorrows weather report.
Then again, who wants to waste the time watching that, or even uploading it.
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I dunno what you're talking about... seems to me, every time I've turned on a regular cable news station, doesn't matter which one, it seems the format you described is already one they've adopted. So people *must* like watching crap like that, or why would they all be pushing it, instead of actual news?
I'm always reminded (Score:2, Insightful)
Whenever I hear of things like this, especially on the internet, I always remember:
1) believe none of what you hear
2) believe half of what you see
And since that saying was coined many years ago, it may need to be adjusted to meet today's world. Many things can appear real, but be false. In this way, the truth is even more hidden, because "...yeah yeah, it's real, I saw it on youtube". I've posted false stuff on youtube before, you can too. Of course, I'm anonymous though. Maybe if it's real people....
Just because it's on YouTube doesn't make it real. (Score:3)
With Video Editing and Rendering software being ubiquitous , now we have to ask, "Is it real, or is it CGI?". There are plenty of examples on YouTube that look real, but are 100% fake. So the paradigm has shifted from "Is the rumor real" to "Is the video real".
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you just described porn
half the crazy shite you see in porn movies is edited from different takes with lots of breaks
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you just described porn
half the crazy shite you see in porn movies is edited from different takes with lots of breaks
Guess I better do some further "research" to confirm or deny this...
The Example Rule (Score:5, Interesting)
The book "The Science of Fear' calls this the example rule. The rule that somehow because something just happened, that it is now likely to happen again. People are wired such that they usually act this way(gut), only your head can override your gut when you know you are following this rule.
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The Videos (Score:5, Informative)
A burglar gets stuck in a chimney [huffingtonpost.com]
A truck driver in a head on collision is thrown out the front window and lands on his feet, walks away [youtube.com]
A wild antelope knocks a man off his bike [youtube.com]
A candle at a wedding sets the bride's hair on fire [youtube.com]
Someone fishing off a backyard dock catches a huge man-size shark [youtube.com]
Magical thinking (Score:2)
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If you think that people who understand statistics are immunized against magical thinking I have a bridge to sell you.
A suitable knowledge of mathematics allows you to calculate correct answers to problems that intuition provides lousy answers to; but that doesn't make intution shut up, unfortunately.
If you dangle somebody from a crane, hundreds of feet above the ground and all those teeny little figures walking about, does that person's heart rate, blood pressure, adrenaline levels, and similar fear respon
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If you think that people who understand statistics are immunized against magical thinking I have a bridge to sell you.
A suitable knowledge of mathematics allows you to calculate correct answers to problems that intuition provides lousy answers to; but that doesn't make intution shut up, unfortunately.
If you dangle somebody from a crane, hundreds of feet above the ground and all those teeny little figures walking about, does that person's heart rate, blood pressure, adrenaline levels, and similar fear responses have any useful correlation to their knowledge of the tensile strength of the steel cable they are attached to?
Actually, intuition is pretty darn important, even in math, at least theoretical math. Stephen Hawkins relies on intuition. So did Einstein. So do numerous others. Intuition isn't always correct, but without it, analytical thought can't really develop.
Besides, even mat itself isn't as concrete as we want to make it. Math tells us that the square root of a number is a value that, when multiplied by itself, gives the number. No magic involved there. However, much of physics relies on imaginary numbers (t
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Oh, I don't mean to deny the value of intuition generally; but just to note that mere 'knowledge' doesn't have the same ability to grab you by the amygdalae and squeeze until you sweat bullets. In suitably gifted and trained individuals it can deliver correct answers far faster than conscious thought, and without visible effort(observe any reasonably coordinated child who doesn't even know pre-calc compute the trajectory of a thrown ball in time to catch it); but if a hardwired response contrary to your ana
MMUE (Score:2)
I would be interested... (Score:5, Interesting)
... in a study that applied this concept to things like lottery winnings (would people buy lottery tickets as much if they didn't know anybody who won?) fear-based behaviors (would people be avoiding running in parks so much if they very rarely heard of related crimes?) dishonesty/narcissism (would people try so much to 'get ahead' by dishonest means if they didn't think that 'everybody does it' which is validated by watching the national news?) etc. etc. etc.
It seems that we spent many, many, many hundreds of years being routinely exposed only to a very small set of other people (the ones living in our village) which gave us a push towards conformity with our limited surroundings and its values and calibrated our 'probability meter' with that amount of 'throws of the dice' in mind. Nowadays no matter what you want to think/believe it is trivial to find many people sharing your point of view and/or finding events that validate your belief/magical thinking.
As I was saying before, if you had never ever met anybody in your life who won a lottery, you would be a lot more likely to look at lottery tickets as a very frivolous use of money, while nowadays where every few weeks you see in the news (with a special interest story, that makes you think you "know" these people) somebody wins a significant amount of money somewhere it's a lot easier to 'magical think' that lottery tickets are instead a lot more worth it (in statistical terms) than they really are.
Just like a lot of people I know that will not run alone in a park because somebody somewhere was victim of a crime and so they are afraid of doing so (without obviously realizing how low the probability that something like that would happen to them, much lower than the probability of them being run over by a car when they run along a road instead).
I don't think that we are equipped to extrapolate probabilities from the small to the large: when it comes to 50 people we are fairly capable of distinguishing normal occurrences, low probability occurrences and once-in-a-blue-moon occurrences, but when it comes to several hundred millions we really can't cope and cannot relate how something that happens to 10 people on a nation-wide level (say, win a lottery jackpot of 100+ millions) is way, way, way unlikely that will happen to us or to somebody we know personally. This is definitely affecting most people's behaviors, in some cases positively (say, rare disease sufferers can find somebody else somewhere that has their same symptoms and can get care, instead of being dismissed) but in many cases not overly so unfortunately.
Improbability and sample size (Score:2)
That someone will be knocked off their bike by an antelope -somewhere in the world- is not improbable.
If the sample size is reduced or specific by reference to the actual case at hand, such as dreaming of being knocked off your bike by an antelope, and then a week later, it actually happening, it becomes extraordinarily improbable.
Most people are not confused by this, even if it serves skepticism to insist they are. Few are unclear on the distinction in probability between "someone will win the lottery" a
This is GOOD not bad. (Score:3)
This is especially true when the improbable are human achievements. It shows us exactly what the human body is capable of even when constrained by physics. If anything, this wealth of data allows us to be more critical and logical to discern what exactly is going on.
The human brain is an awesome knowledge digester, if you feed it truth, it's not going to produce untruths. For example, athletes viewing recordings of themselves or of competition. There is a tendency in olympic sports to standardize on certain technique aspects that have been proven to work for others. There is a higher congruency of movement in athletes today than there was in the early filmings of the olympics, and higher inter-disciplinary congruence as well as we discover the simple physical truth. Humans are subject to the laws of physics, as such there are optimal paths for the human body to be all it can be.
Of course, there's always people too stupid to recognize they do not have the necessary knowledge and control to execute a movement and there's thousands of compilations of these failures. That's a good thing though, just more data to feed into the path optimizer.
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Catching the 'improbable' on film makes it easier to study and to reduce the improbability of the event occuring again.
Heisenberg, if he were alive today, might argue otherwise.
and don't forget... (Score:2)
Thank you, Captain Obvious (Score:2)
A similar comment was made when British newspapers started publishing minor news items telegraphed from far away places in the 19th century. There's a classic quote on this which I can't find at the moment. Must be a slow day at the meme factory.
So you're saying.... (Score:2)
You're saying that 60% of drives ending in car wrecks and drunken debauchery in Russia is the "New Normal?"
Okay then. Off to the liquor store at 50kph over!
Pratchett's Rule. (Score:2)
“Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one.
But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.”
Terry Pratchett, Mort
So the internet has made Pratchett's rule a reality. Now all I want it to do is give us giant turtles and ambulatory luggage.
Hogwash (Score:2)
Hogwash! It doesn't matter how many improbable things appear online. It won't actually change the probability of something that is improbable happening. If the likelihood of being thrown through the windshield and landing on your feet and running away is 1 in 1,000,000,000, then it is still the same probability regardless of how many people saw a clip of it on you-tube.
So, unless the original post is positing that somehow observing the improbable event by millions of people on you-tube is going to cause a
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The probability may be 1 in 1,000,000,000, but in a world with 7,000,000,000 people on it, it becomes... likely.
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The probability may be 1 in 1,000,000,000, but in a world with 7,000,000,000 people on it, it becomes... likely.
Oops, that was supposed to read 1 in 6,000,000,000! but even at a 1:7 ratio, that is still only a 14.7% likelihood, so not likely at all, and far from "normal" as the article stated.
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The probability may be 1 in 1,000,000,000, but in a world with 7,000,000,000 people on it, it becomes... likely.
Oops, that was supposed to read 1 in 6,000,000,000! but even at a 1:7 ratio, that is still only a 14.7% likelihood, so not likely at all, and far from "normal" as the article stated.
I need to go to bed. I don't know where the 14.7% comment came from. 1 in 1,000,000,000 would imply 7 people on the planet could pull it off, not very likely at all.
space travel here we come (Score:2)
We need more of these videos! And whales.
http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Infinite_Improbability_Drive [wikia.com]
fueling paranoia (Score:3)
This is essentially the same phenomenon that TV news has been performing, and which has convinced many people that there is an epidemic of child abductions and other violent crime in our society. (And there is not.) The improbable events of 7 billions lives are being condensed into our individual (vicarious) experience – but with the average person being unable to instinctively grasp that vast context – and we're losing our sense of perspective. Little wonder that people are locking themselves and their children inside gated, armed enclaves.
Links or it did not happen (Score:2)
"A burglar gets stuck in a chimney, a truck driver in a head on collision is thrown out the front window and lands on his feet, walks away; a wild antelope knocks a man off his bike; a candle at a wedding sets the bride's hair on fire; someone fishing off a backyard dock catches a huge man-size shark
Links or it did not happen
You Tube as Evolution (Score:3, Interesting)
The next big step up the evolutionary ladder is "Suck It and See Learning" where the individual modifies behaviour based on its past experience: that stung me, this tasted good, etc. The individual no longer has to die to learn something. Progress. An extension of this mode is learning not just by personal trial and error but also by watching other members of your species, usually mom and or dad. A baby bird learns how and where to catch worms not just by endlessly scratching around in random patches of dirt until it jags a worm, but by doing the rounds with its parents. It can also learn signs of danger so it doesn't need to be eaten by a cat to find out why cats are interested in birds.
Humans add another even more sophisticated layer on this, which might be called Narrative Learning. This is basically creating and swapping stories. It might also be called knowledge, but isn't knowledge just stories that happen to be true, or true enough to be useful. This is what allows us to handle very low probability events, things that might occur once a year, once in a lifetime (water flowing underground) or even once in several generations. If you happen to be living out on the plains of Africa half a million years ago this kind of stuff would give you a wild advantage over all the monkey-see-monkey-do types around you. How to choose a good spear, how to predict the seasons, when to shift camp, what plants can kill you, etc. Science is the ultimate form of narrative learning; stories are picked not because they sound right/are interesting/are sexy/worked once, but by relentlessly grinding them up against reality.
And this capacity for narrative learning is, of course, why we find the improbable events on You Tube - or the Bible - so very compelling: we have evolved to love and collect the improbable, just because it just might save us one day. I know that next time I crash a truck, I'm going through the window, and landing on my feet. It works.
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Let me guess. You failed history.
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Please make a (false) statement so I can rebut it with reality. All you've done so far is a feeble ad-hominem suggesting I know nothing of history. In fact I know a very great deal about the situation. So, please try your hand, I'm guessing your mental model of the world is vastly out of whack with reality (which was the point of my original post, so many people love to embrace the slander and never ever check the facts for themselves). "The Improbable (and outrageously slanderous) is the New Normal" inde
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Ah, I see you are insufferably arrogant as well as wrong. It's always ok to be wrong, but it is a character flaw to be arrogant (I've been there, mostly kicked the habit, now recognize the flaw in others). Arrogance does not equal intelligence, so please don't confuse them.
You ought be apologizing to me since it is you who accused me of not understanding history yet I understand the facts very very well (and I'd wager a lot better than you). However, let's ignore the slight and get on with the topic at
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Not only is there the improbable out there, there are also outright slanders. Particularly against Israel and the US. All sorts of conspiracy junk that blames them for the world's ills and based on falsehoods that are trivially easy to disprove with facts. However, idiots lap it up. Just wait for the flames in reply to this post - and watch how people with froth at the mouth based on cherished falsehoods rather than quoting actual *facts*. It is incredible just how backward the world has become, that people will hate blindly without ever checking any facts whatsoever (accepting false *facts* from propagandists instead). Cue the rants ...
Facts or references, please.
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42
What would you specifically like to know?
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Facts or references, please.
Wow man. Don't you pay attention to anything coming out of oh...the middle east these days? Or Pakistan, or islamist parts of Africa or Asia? It's all the zionists fault or the jews, or the americans.
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It's even worse, even the US is kinda subdued these days and the Secretary of State has just concluded UN HRC resolution 16/18 where she agree she would suppress the First Amendment rights of her own citizens. This is both shocking and shameful. Without Free Speech we are borked, and the US government policy is actually suppressing eg. Hillary's shameful statements, or the US military being prohibited from associating Islamism and terrorism; see any of Major Stephen Coughlin's analyses on YouTube for more
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I understand, and even agree with with the sentiment you were originally posting. I was just pointing out that your post lacked citations, which technically made it no more valid than the posts you were complaining about.
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Facts or references, please.
Wow man. Don't you pay attention to anything coming out of oh...the middle east these days? Or Pakistan, or islamist parts of Africa or Asia? It's all the zionists fault or the jews, or the americans.
You miss the point. The OP was complaining about people accepting things on the internet without checking facts. All I asked was for the data or reference to support that statement. But then, from the sound of your post, you don't sound like an avid fact checker, either.
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You miss the point. The OP was complaining about people accepting things on the internet without checking facts.
Apparently you missed this thing in debating called "common knowledge" it also applies to law. That certain facts are known without data or reference required to back them up. Things such as: 0C is the freezing point of water, the sky is blue. Human blood is red(unless you're red-green colour blind). That there are serious problems in the previously mentioned countries with them placing blame on any other third party. Those parties in no order are: America, the Zionists, and the Jews.
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I second that. We see all kinds of improbable things but yet nothing of space aliens, bigfoot, etc. All that's new these days is better CGI along with crappier TV shows.
Actually we see "aliens" all the time (who else cooks your food, does landscaping, and mops the floors).
I do have a audio recording of Bigfoot, NORAD Western Area Defense Sector callword, someone recorded off 271.0 and posted an mp3 on http://groups.yahoo.com/group/baymilcom [yahoo.com]. "Bigfoot" was giving squaks and vectors to a KC-135.