What is the Probability of Someone Replicating Your Actions in a Day?

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Discussion Overview

The discussion revolves around predicting the probability that someone will replicate a specific action within a day. Participants explore the necessary factors for such a calculation, including population size and the frequency of actions within a given timeframe.

Discussion Character

  • Exploratory
  • Debate/contested

Main Points Raised

  • One participant suggests that to predict the probability, one must consider the total population and the number of seconds in a day, proposing a basic calculation of 1/86,400 for an individual action.
  • Another participant emphasizes the importance of the specific action's probability, noting that common actions (like having a beer) have a high likelihood of being replicated, while rare actions (like breaking a world record) have a very low probability.
  • A participant questions the reliability of the C.I.A. Fact Book as a source for population data, citing concerns about significant digits and error analysis.
  • Another participant humorously remarks on the irony of the C.I.A. publishing a fact book, suggesting a misunderstanding of the source's intent.
  • One participant advocates for transparency in public interest information, questioning whether the world population should be considered secretive information.

Areas of Agreement / Disagreement

Participants express differing views on the reliability of sources and the implications of population data. There is no consensus on how to approach the calculation of probabilities for specific actions, indicating multiple competing perspectives.

Contextual Notes

Participants do not fully resolve the mathematical steps needed to calculate the probability of action replication, and there are assumptions about the nature of actions that remain unexamined.

Prague
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How do you suppose you predict the probability someone will do the same thing you did within a day?

I suppose you would need to know the total populations, and according to the C.I.A Fact Book it is 6,379,157,361 (July 2004 est.), which is good enough for me. And I suppose you would need to know how many seconds someone could initiate a certain task (we are setting the intitial time it takes to start a task to = 1 second). So it takes one second to start task and there are 86400 seconds in a day. That means that there is 86,400 possible chances for someone to do something.

so a single person has 1/86,400 chance of doing something.

Now you need to incorporate the population minus you. So it would be 6,379,157,360 people have a 1/86,400 chance of doing something.

This is where I don't know what to do next. Would you need to know that there are a total of 5.511591959 x 10^14 chances that someone on the Earth is doing something, but how to you calculate something? A task I mean.

*this may not make sense, because I just edited it and it didn't make much sense to me but I think you may get what I am getting at anyways.
 
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The key thing you are missing is the probability of anyone individual doing whatever particular "thing" you are talking about.

The probability of some one person somewhere in the world having a beer withing a day of the time you did is pretty darn close to 1.

On the other hand if you were to break the worlds record in the 1500 m run, the probability of some one person in the world doing the same thing within a day is awfully low.
 
Oh,and don't rely on C.I.A. Fact Book...They never heard of significant digits and error analysis...

Daniel.
 
I'm amazed that the C.I.A would publish a fact book! Isn't everything they do secret?

(Perhaps you meant "Culinary Institute of America"?)
 
Should the world population be kept a secret...?I believe transparency of public interest information should be true for every institution.

And is this a matter of national security?I doubt it.

Daniel.
 

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