“You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won’t believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!”
The point that Feynman was trying to make is that you can’t just hunt for anomalies after the fact and then say they are somehow significant. You have to make predictions and do the test and see if those predictions bear out. In the same way it’s not amazing (at least statistically, although perhaps biologically) that any one person is born. It’s just like that license plate. Of course, the license plate ARW 357 is one of millions of possibilities, but that doesn’t mean that it’s amazing every time you see a license plate. They’re all one of millions, and it has to be one of them.
No one places much significance on the random people who win the lottery. But if that random person happens to be you, you feel incredibly lucky (and rightfully so).
The flip side is that, of course, it can be meaningful - not scientifically, but emotionally - to talk about probabilities after the fact. If a meteorite falls and smashes a car next to you, the first thing to your mind wouldn't be that it's not that special because the probability of its happening is 1.
My issue is that the author doesn't really give a good reason for stopping at the probability that two human beings will reproduce and reproduce until they eventually create you.
Some interesting further probabilities to factor in:
- Chance that two human beings evolved from single-celled organisms
- Chance that life came into existence on Earth
- Chance that Earth formed at all
- Chance that the laws of the universe among all the possible universes were conducive to the creation of Earth
I should hope by this point I've made a reasonable claim that the probability of my own existence is 0.
“You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won’t believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!”
The point that Feynman was trying to make is that you can’t just hunt for anomalies after the fact and then say they are somehow significant. You have to make predictions and do the test and see if those predictions bear out. In the same way it’s not amazing (at least statistically, although perhaps biologically) that any one person is born. It’s just like that license plate. Of course, the license plate ARW 357 is one of millions of possibilities, but that doesn’t mean that it’s amazing every time you see a license plate. They’re all one of millions, and it has to be one of them.
I came to say that, but it's eloquently copied from: http://surplusgamer.tumblr.com/post/1114853865/derren-brown-...