Probably 1 in 28.On the first pick, 1 in 4 (well, 2 in 8) chances. If you get that right, 1 in 7 on the second, for 1 in 28.
Or, you could just put 8 choose 2 into google.
Call it optimism and pessimism, or call it a nomadic gene, but it was shown some time ago that a species that does not have a few wanderers will die out. IIRC, the optimum percentage of wanderers was around 5%.We don't usually associate human traits with non-humans, so using terms like optimism and pessimism is risky.
However, if no members of a species wander off see what is on the other side of the hill, then the species remains confined to one area. If problems hit that area - heat, cold, drought, floods - the species can be wiped out.
If too many wander, numbers could be too low to sustain the species anywhere.
Having said that, almost all of the wanderers simply die when they reach a place that cannot sustain them. In birds, first year birds that go north instead of south almost always die come winter.
So, wandering is essential but most wanderers die almost immediately.
Not a great role, but someone has to do it.
Most logical errors are due to false assumptions. For example, there is not equal chance a person could be born on any day of the year. Think about cold weather.
The Monty Hall problem is a classic that most get wrong because most do not consider the complement probabilty, i.e. if an event has X chance of happening then the chance of it not happening is 1 - X. Once you think of the complement many problems in probability become much easier.
I don't know how one would compute a probabilty for an an event within X time period for a complex system like the US economy since it is non-linear meaning at some value 'x' and 'y' it holds that: 1) xF(y) <> F(x * y) and 2) F(x + y) <> xF(x) + F(y). Some call this an inflection point but in math it is called a non-continuity meaning the domain is not smooth.
Let's not forget: until recently, it was difficult to do anything useful at night because of the lack of practical, portable lighting. The most valuable thing to do at night was to sleep so as to be at one's best during daylight hours. Maybe after a few thousand more years of convenient, practical lighting, we'll need a lot less sleep!
Travlin,
I have a link you may be interested in, this is an RSA Animate video titled "Smile or Die". I don't know if these have been widely posted here or not but it is quite well done and worth the time.
In my mind I keep asking, how has it come to this, how did we get here, what is going on. The only explanation that works for me is generational theory, such as Strauss and Howe and their ideas about a Fourth Turning. Some dismiss their work as non-falsifable and all that but for me it works.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo
CowpokeYes, there were some interesting observations there.
Travlin
Great post Brent1023.It does not just paint things in black and white, there are lots of shades in between.
Even so we now have the option of "Print money" or "Not print money".
Or, is that really the case? Do we have more options?
As you pointed out if we just got the question:
"should the goverment print money to pay its bills?"
We know that lots of moneyprinting will lead to inflation etc and we just makes things worse for the future, so it is easy to simple answer "No" quickly.
Then we look deeper into the problem and reallize that we are in deep shit, so the simple "No" answer will cause all sorts of problems, so it is simpler to just answer "Yes, print more money".
Thinking yat again we remember that it will ruin the life of our kids etc by constantly just print money to push the problem further on, as it makes things worse.
One logical conclusion would be that we need to make sure that we will not run long term masive money printing (more than GDP growth). Once we have setup a budget that all can agree on that is considerably better than the allowed long term money printing we can allow ourselves the lyxury to solve the immediate problems with money printing or more loans or MintTheCoin or whatever trick we choose to use.
That's just crappy software at work. We have all had shifting baselines thanks to Microsoft on what is acceptable. Why is it that rebooting is considered an acceptable repair technique? If you write software for truly important things, ever having to do an unplanned reboot is not acceptable. We used to measure up-time in months to years (3.5 years for one) for some of our critical systems.
It also shows why additional complexity leads to fragility. More code - more bugs…
I only reboot my Linux-based music system when I apply a firmware update when I decide I want the new features (it is embedeed Linux and uses average of 20W with mirrored drives). It has many times ran longer than 1 year and streams mostly FLAC files.
Even worse then flawed analysis is the predetermined outcome. I see that way too often.
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