Comments | dteleki: That Tortoise-And-Hare Odds-Vs.-Probability Thing

dteleki

That Tortoise-And-Hare Odds-Vs.-Probability Thing

Oct 16, 2007 01:36

This post in my blog is my astonishingly long reply to an ongoing conversation in ozarque's blog. My post is so big that it would have hopelessly clogged up the comments there.

ozarque's post that this WOULD have been a comment to, if my comment hadn't been so long, is HERE ( Read more... )

Comments 7

bemused_leftist October 16 2007, 09:36:17 UTC

PROGRAM LISTING WINDOW: [highlighted text:] "odds" is a word that means "probability".
....
OZARQUE: [types into the Input Window:] odds is not the same thing as likelihood.I'm pretty much with you on most of this post, but here I'd need a different wording. My brain knows that for MOST people MOST of the time, the words 'odds' and 'likelihood' and 'probablity' ARE pretty interchangeable. So that's what, in normal speech, the words DO mean ( ... )

archangelbeth October 16 2007, 14:59:59 UTC

Actually, in normal speech...
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=odds
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=likelihood
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=probability

Okay, it's quite legit to argue that that's dictionary speech, and not "normal" speech. On the other hand, recourse to a dictionary does give different nuances. Saying that those nuances are totally invalid? It'd be like telling me that "teal" and "indigo" and "sapphire" and "turquoise" were all just plain "blue." Sure, they all partake of blueness (except in my crayons, which have forever ensured that turquoise is more green than the stone itself, to my brain) -- but they are not all exactly the same and equating them would result in clashing colors if the computer were allowed to dress itself ( ... )

dteleki October 17 2007, 18:43:22 UTC

Something more like ( ... )

dteleki October 17 2007, 19:23:32 UTC

Oops!

"[StatisticsProbability]" is a word that means [[StatisticsQuantityOfSuccesses]] divided by [[StatisticsQuantityOfTrials]].

Thread 6

victoriacatlady October 27 2007, 13:30:23 UTC

This posting was a lot of fun to read; I can well believe that it was (as you said) FUN to write.

I am impressed by the parallelisms you very carefully inserted over and over in your phonemics/phonetics versus odds/probability section. And the "silly little drama" was potentially rather useful to me, in that my closest RealLife friend thinks in a very similar way to Ozarque (or so I believe), whereas I, like you, have a tendency to jump up and down yelling when I've figured something out. It may help me to avoid hurting her inadvertently in the future, as I have occasionally done in the past.