Originally posted by Rank outsider
Sorry for the delay in response.
Firstly, I owe you an apology. I forget that some peope really care about the quality of their posts, and my comment 'I don't understand a word' of what you said was not intended as a criticism, nor of course is it true.
I gave up maths and science at 16 and it was simply intended as an expression of the difficul ...[text shortened]... planck time units because, let's be honest, you were just showing off there.
😉
Hey no problem, Thank you for taking the time.
No apology needed, That was exactly the kind of stuff I needed to know.
One of the problems of getting into any particular subject is that you pick up its jargon and forget/loose track of
what someone who isn't into the topic can follow.
I often have a similar problem when talking to economists and philosophers when they use terms and jargon I don't
get, so I know exactly what it's like to be on the wrong end of. So being told when I have done the same thing is
helpful because I can hopefully fix it, and try to avoid doing it again.
Having said that you seem to have grasped the essence of my argument perfectly, the maths detail isn't there, but
the basics of the argument you have right.
As for the terms you highlighted...
Probability mass just means the amount of probability a particular proposition has.
So if you have an experiment with 5 outcomes, A, B, C, D, and E. And the probability of getting (say) outcome C is 26.4%
then you can say that outcome C has a probability mass of 26.4%... It's just another way of saying that the probability of
something is.
The reason I said Short scale was actually to avoid confusion... So that worked out well ;-)
I was just saying that I was using the short versions of million, billion, trillion ect.
As opposed the the long versions.
On the Short scale....
1 thousand = 1,000 : 1 Million = 1,000,000 or 1 thousand thousand : 1 billion = 1,000,000,000 or 1 thousand million : 1 trillion = 1,000,000,000,000 or 1 thousand billion.
Ever step goes up by a factor of one thousand.
On the Long scale...
1 thousand = 1,000 : 1 Million = 1,000,000 or 1 thousand thousand : 1 billion = 1,000,000,000,000 or 1 million million : 1 trillion = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 1 billion billion
So you can see why it makes a difference which one you use.... Most people use the short scale, but I just wanted to be clear
which I was using because some people do use the long scale.
[note: sometimes when you hear someone say something is 1 thousand million
and wonder why they didn't just say billion, it's because in long scale 1 billion is a million million not a thousand million.]
Bayesian Theory is a part of probability theory devoted to matching theory to reality. It's basically the mathematical way of determining
probabilistically what the evidence you currently have is telling you. I wasn't really expecting most people to know what
Solomonoff Induction and Bayesian theory were... It was more that I was referencing the theories I was working from.
Most/many people have heard of Occam's razor, even if most people get it wrong.
But I was referencing the theories that actually formally prove that Occam's razor is valid and correct.
Sort of a bit like saying "according to special relativity you can't accelerate to faster than the speed of light".
If your interested you know where to go look for the proof that Occam's razor is correct, but I am not about to try to prove
it myself on these forums.
As for doing it in hours....
I considered doing it in hours, but I went with seconds because they are roughly the shortest human level unit of time.
We don't really perceive events that happen over sub-second time periods, and if you go into sub-second time intervals
then I couldn't really see any reasonable stopping points before you hit plank time.
However doing the calculation in hours simply changes the answer by 3 orders of mag... which is not in this case really significant.
You still come to the same conclusion.
God created everything one hour ago!
13 Feb '13 16:26
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