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To: Ha Ha Thats Very Logical

A goal implies a result achieved by some deliberate action or plan. We set goals to obtain a result. There is no particular way I can roll the dice to get the result I want. The process of rolling the dice could care less about my goal, and the outcome is independent of how I roll the dice. If rolling a 7 is my goal, I won’t get it any faster or slower just because I made it a goal, but only because of the probability of the roll and how fast I can throw the dice. Because 7 is a possible enpoint, I can calculate a probability.


155 posted on 05/28/2012 12:32:53 PM PDT by trubolotta
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To: trubolotta; exDemMom
Because 7 is a possible enpoint, I can calculate a probability

Yes, but you're calculating the probability of a particular endpoint. Like with what you say about evolution, where you're calculating the probability of ending up with homo sapiens. If you start from scratch and figure out the probability of a specific endpoint (like humans), yeah, the number looks astronomical. But evolution doesn't care about ending up with humans. If you calculate the probability of ending up with something viable--which is all evolution cares about--the number gets a lot smaller.

To use exDemMom's analogy: if you calculate the odds of me winning the lottery, the numbers are huge. But if you calculate the odds of someone winning the lottery, they're not nearly so scary. I'm not sure if there's a similar analogy for dice, since they have a limited, predefined set of outcomes. Maybe something like, rather than calculating the odds of rolling a 7, calculating the chances that someone in a roomful of people would have whatever number you threw, regardless of what the number was.

156 posted on 05/28/2012 1:13:47 PM PDT by Ha Ha Thats Very Logical
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