Irkings Continued: Probability

In the study of cosmology, where actual data is scarce and one has to rely strongly on mathematical theory and probability, I find myself getting incteasingly frustrated by the approach so many people take with probability. This is actually a problem I've had with the subject ever since I first encountered it in my junior year math class. (ironically, this was the best I ever did on any type of math in that class by far- so hopefully this is not simply the product of my own stupidity)

So here's my super secret beleif: Probability is bullshit.

Really, it is. I can never say so in class because I will immidiatley be bombarded by people demanding an explanation, which I would then have to give orally and therefore deeply fail. But here's how it works:

If there are five marbles in a bag, each a different color, then the probabality of getting one marble of one color blindly is 20 percent. if you repeat this process, the more you do it the more the actual results will come to resemble what probablity dictates. So yes, probability can explain what has happenned in the past or over a large series of attempts, but it can tell us absolutley nothing about what will happen, and essentially breaks down when it comes to anything really important.

In life, very important decisions are rarely remade enough times to reveal their statistical nature. If you have 1 bullet, 100 or so square inches of skin it could hit on someone, and zero skillz, probability tells you that you will eventually hit the target you want at least once for every 100 or so times you fire. But you don't have 100 shots- you have one. As that bullet sails through the air, the chances are 1/100 that it will hit the target you want. Here's the common mistake: most people assume that since it is so unlikely, it won't happen. But what if it did? It still could, infact, hit the spot right on target. And once it does, where is your precious probability now? Since you only had one bullet and one try, it's completley irrelevant. If there was a different universe for each possible outcome, we could have been living in the one where it hits all along and not have even known it.

Now we can expand this thinking to greater things, namely probablity itself. Back to the marbles- there is a small chance that no matter how many times you grab into the bag blindly, you will pick out the same marble. But what if you did keep trying again and again, and kept on getting the same marble. It could absolutley happen. We might simply be unknowingly living in that specific universe of possibility, and in that indefinite phase before the next marble is taken out of the bag, no one is any wiser.

And here's another issue I have with statistics even if we ignore the latter- Birth Control. They say the pill is 99.9% effective, but what does that really mean? Does that mean that for every 1000 women who use the pill in their lifetime, only one will still get pregnant? Or does it mean that for every day a woman takes the pill, there is a 1/1000 chance that this is the day it won't work? Or, even worse, does it mean that for every 1000 individual times she has intercourse while using the pill, one of every thousand is unprotected? They're all very different actual numbers. Ponder it.