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Edited on Mon Nov-10-08 05:49 PM by Occam Bandage
We each roll a standard die inside a box the other cannot see. We're playing a simple game: if the total of our dice is even, you win; if the total of our dice is odd, I win.
Suppose you have rolled a 3. Suppose I have rolled a 4, but it is in its box and you cannot see it. After you look at your die, you could, with full justification, say that you have a 50% chance of winning; no statistician would look in your box and dispute your claim. However, that does not mean that if you rewind time to the moment you made that declaration and play the universe from that moment forward one million times, that you will win approximately five hundred thousand games. You do not actually have a 50% chance of winning. You have a 0% chance of winning; your 50% figure was based on incomplete data. It did not so much represent your actual chance of winning as it did the average chance of winning of a hypothetical person whose situation matched your data and with all other variables random.
On election day, John McCain did not actually have a 2% chance of winning. His chance of winning was so small that I am hesitant to say it is anything but zero. I do not believe that any chain of quantum events starting on Nov. 4th could have caused the election of John McCain.
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