[UA] Risk: It's a dessert topping AND a floor wax!

rowan at media.mit.edu rowan at media.mit.edu
Wed May 9 11:19:37 PDT 2001


> Here's four situations that may illustrate it.

Not to draw this thread out ad nauseam, but, uh... well, yeah, I guess I do mean 
to.

Greg, did you read the other posts on this topic? The notion of "chance" is 
contingent on what is _known_ from the POV of the observer. 

> 1) Entropomancer sees a train coming, decides to race it across the
> tracks.
> Succeed or fail, he's charged.  He saw the danger and the danger was
> real.

Train is 200 feet away, man is 50 feet away. If the man can run 1/4 the speed of 
the train, he is in no danger. If he cannot, he is dead. It is a 
completely deterministic situation. Where's the chance? I'll tell you: the 
chance lies in him not _knowing_ exactly how fast he can run, how fast the train 
is going, and how far away they both are from the crossing point.

This point hasn't been bandied about for so long just because we're idiots. It's 
been bandied about because the Entropomancy rules as written rely on a very 
shaky definition of probability.

-Matt Norwood

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