this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2024
631 points (93.8% liked)

Science Memes

11404 readers
1390 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.



Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] ramenshaman 10 points 1 month ago (2 children)

That's not how percentages work

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Moreover, that's not how probability works in independent events.

It'd be like saying "I flipped coin A 1 billion times and got half a billion heads, so now that I'm flipping coin B 100 times, I probably won't get any more heads."

It should be fairly obvious that you can say the exact same statement about tails, and get a completely contradictory statement.

[–] NorthWestWind 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Say, there exists 2 humans and 98 bacteria. Consider all cells of a human one life.

50% of ALL life doesn't care which species the life is, and therefore there's a chance that 50 bacteria die. The probability of that happening is 98C50 / 100C50 = 98! 50! 50! / (100! 50! 48!) = (50)(49) / ((100)(99)) = 0.247

For my previous argument, I did not actually do the math. Now that I have done a little bit, the probability seems to converge at 25%

Obviously, this is based on the interpretation of "all life". For my interpretation, "all life" includes every life in a single set, and apply the 50% snap to that. For some others however, it may be interpreted as each species in their own set, and the 50% snap is applied on each set individually.

[–] ramenshaman 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

But if there are 7 billion humans and n bacteria, and 50% of them are snapped, wouldn't approximately 3.5 billion humans and n/2 bacteria be snapped?

[–] NorthWestWind 1 points 1 month ago

The problem is the ambiguity of the statement. Is it 50% of each species? Or is it 50% of all life as one set?

If it's the former case, then sure 3.5b humans and n/2 bacteria gets snapped.

But if it's the latter case, we group all 7b and n bacteria into one set and snap half of them. This 50% can consist of 50% humans + 50% bacteria, but there's also a chance for it to include 0% humans + 100% bacteria. Therefore, the amount of humans snap is a random variable instead of a constant.