• Neato@kbin.social
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    10 months ago

    Minor correction: in a few billion years our sun will expand into its red giant death phase.

    Also: our star can’t go nova by our understanding of astrophysics. If it actually can, then we might need to throw out a lot of astrophysics, including predictions on when our star will expand.

    Also also: the odds of the dice giving double 6s is MUCH higher than our sun going nova at any point in time even if it could go nova and was overdue.

    • triclops6@lemmy.ca
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      10 months ago

      That last part is what the Bayesian scientist is wagering on, it’s not missing, as op suggested

      • Neato@kbin.social
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        10 months ago

        Ah, gotcha. I tried learning Bayesian probability once and failed utterly. One of the only classes I just barely passed (stat was the other). My brain just barely computes it.

        • triclops6@lemmy.ca
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          10 months ago

          The intuition is exactly your argument:

          When the machine says yes it’s either because

          (1) the sun went nova (vanishingly small chance) and machine rolled truth (prob 35/36) – the joint probability of this (the product) is near zero

          OR

          (2) sun didn’t go nova (prob of basically one) and machine rolled lie (prob 1/36) – joint prob near 1/36

          Think of joint probability as the total likelihood. It is much more likely we are in scenario 2 because the total likelihood of that event (just under 1/36) is astronomically higher than the alternative (near zero)

          I’m skipping stuff but hopefully my words make clear what they math doesn’t always

    • IsoSpandy@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      I think our sun can go nova. What it can’t do is supernova based on the Chandrashekhar limit