I wonder how many of the people who read this article have ever told fortunes or performed various kinds of divination, and how many of them feel that they are accurate in the process?
But if the information they convey is actually in line with the laws of mathematics and is a task that can be accomplished by all, and we are actually deliberately misled, then do we feel unconvinced? Do we think that I am alarmist?
In fact, what is more, we encounter many unbelievable events in our daily life, such as someone can accurately predict the crash of a plane, and even be able to accurately determine how many people die; We don't believe that this kind of chance happens, we often think that someone must be operating in the dark, but in fact, these are still in line with the laws of mathematics, and they are still inevitable results, do we also feel incomprehensible?
Kit Yates, Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Oxford, while he is conducting professional research, he is also giving us the relevant knowledge of mathematics for ordinary authors, so that mathematics can play a greater role in our lives and let us better understand the world.
Rather, his book "Scientific Prediction" takes us to predict events that we think cannot happen, but are inevitable, in a time full of randomness and uncertainty.
For example, the fortune telling or divination listed above is easy to explain in its practical mathematical language. If we look at the languages spoken by the soothsayers, in fact, mathematically and statistically, their language conforms to the vast majority of cognitions, and even can be effective in any person, and we ourselves will deliberately ignore the invalid information, which is the ability of the soothsayer.
In fact, they also have a lot of psychological skills to peek into more of our secrets in conversations with us, and then feed these secrets back to us, so that we can build a more trusting relationship with them.
The author here elaborates on his own experience of divination, and we, the readers, have learned more about divination and the skills of a soothsayer as we read it. I believe that after reading it, our cognitive world will definitely rise to a higher level, and we will not be so easily deceived.
So what about the lottery? Why is there a phenomenon of repeated lottery wins? In fact, in mathematics, this is a combination problem. The odds of a lottery recurrence are not a small probability event.
Let's take a look at a case study that we often encounter in our daily lives. In a standard deck of 52 cards, a random draw and then put it back, so how many more times will we draw the probability of drawing the same card to more than 50%? I believe many people think that it will be 26 cards, but in fact, the mathematical answer tells us that it only needs to be nine times, is it subverting our past cognition? and if we draw 9 times, that is, 18 times, the probability of drawing the same card will be more than 96%.
Then think about our lottery winning numbers, decades of continuous draws, and the cumulative number of winning numbers has been in the thousands, so it is not surprising that there are duplicates. This is the perspective that mathematics provides to us to understand the world, and it gives a reasonable explanation for many unthinkable things.
So why would anyone have been able to successfully predict a plane crash? In fact, this is also a kind of "survivorship bias" memory. In our daily life, all kinds of predictions emerge one after another, but most of them are wrong and false, and they are quickly forgotten by us, but those successful predictions are easy to be remembered and spread by more people, and they become the basis for accurate predictions.
Our crowd is a huge base, every day all kinds of predictions are endless, so the probability of accurate prediction will of course greatly increase, and every accurate prediction will be effectively disseminated, will be known by more people, and there will be such an incredible story that can accurately predict, but in fact, it may just be "blind cat meets dead mouse" behind it.
With mathematical methods, our understanding and cognition of life will improve a lot. Then let's read this book of "Scientific Prediction", understand the mathematical knowledge of life prediction, of course, it may also involve a lot of professional mathematical terms, but we do not necessarily need to master these mathematical terms, just through this book to improve our cognitive ability, this is a great improvement for us. #Science Prediction##Math#