Talk:Littlewood's law
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Exemplar Sententia. 04:05, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Definition?
Littlewood's Law supposes these miracles to happen individually? Perhaps a more in depth explanation is due, seems like questionable math to me. I'd also be interested in hearing some examples of these so-called miracles if Littlewood acknowledges their existence.
Caarth 06:01, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Er ...
Are we meant to take the "law" entirely seriously? To me it sounds like a po-faced joke. "Average person experiences around 100,800,000 things (or whatever) a month", my aunt Fanny! I can't find a suitable reference for this, but I reckon Littlewood was having a laugh. Garrick92 13:32, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Piffle
This particular rendering of Littlewoods law is seriously flawed. The only way to make it can make sense is to say: 'If a person makes 1 prediction (of an event with a 1 in a million probability) every second for 35 days, then they will probably be right once' Deglog 20:19, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
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- I have a v v bad headcold at the moment, so I may have hallucinated this. 1) 60 (seconds) x 60 x 24 x 35 (days) ~= 3,000,000; 2) 1: 1,000,000 < 3,000,000 by a factor of three, obviously; 3) So the upshot of this is that if you make three million predictive guesses at odds of a million-to-one, then it's probable (i.e., better than evens) that you'll be right on one of them. Am I missing some dramatic subtlety here? Isn't this a "law" akin to saying that "Nice Things Are Better Than Nasty Things"? Garrick92 11:33, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
There should be a critique on this page, the definition of miracle is flawed. Littlewood makes the assumption based on his own particular reasoning that a miracle is any event that has a one in million chance of occuring. I don't know how widespread this view is, but it seems to me that the generally accepted view of a miracle is completely unexplainable and arguably illogical event. obvious examples would include raising the dead, levitation, disease disapearing without any scientific explanation etc.Colin 8 19:19, 9 March 2007 (UTC)
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- Folks, this "Law" is obviously intended only as a rough approximation. It's also very obvious that people very commonly use the word "miracle" in a general sense.
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- The person who survives the air crash/ship sinking/earthquake/tsunami/bombing/shooting/dangerous disease appears on TV saying, "It's a miracle! Praise the Flying Spaghetti Monster!" The other 99 or 999 or 9999 people who got killed by the same cause don't get to express their opinions on the matter. -- Writtenonsand (talk) 23:51, 23 December 2007 (UTC)
A new section on "Criticism" is called for to discuss several flaws with this hypothesis. The definition is flawed, the probabilities are flawed, etc. Rlsheehan (talk) 19:58, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Dodgy Probabilistics?
I'm no mathematician, but as explained it seems deeply flawed. To work that way, wouldn't each of the 1,000,000 "events" have to be completely independent, not causally linked to one another as actual experiences are? If I'm in my room at instant A, alone, with the door closed, unmiraculously reading a book, surely the likelihood of something "miraculous" happening within my realm of experience at instant A+1 is next to nil, since I'm (practically speaking) in a small, closed system with a limited number of physical objects whose properties (other than those of me myself) are highly static and predictable.
65.213.77.129 (talk) 20:37, 4 March 2008 (UTC)
