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Tenoke comments on Rationality Quotes from people associated with LessWrong - Less Wrong
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"Goedel's Law: as the length of any philosophical discussion increases, the probability of someone incorrectly quoting Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem approaches 1"
--nshepperd on #lesswrong
The probability that someone will say bullshit about quantum mechanics approaches 1 even faster.
At least, the possible worlds in which they don't start collapsing... Or something...
I love that 'bullshit' is now an academic term.
There's a theorem which states that you can never truly prove that.
That doesn't say much; perhaps it approaches 1 as 1 - 1/(1+1/2+1/3...+1/n)?
</pedantic>
I like your example, it implies that the longer the discussion goes, the less likely it is that somebody misquotes G.I.T. in any given statement (or per unit time etc). Kinda the opposite of what the intent of the original quote seems to be.
Yea, but it's clear what he's trying to convey: For any event that has some (fixed) episolon>0 probability of happening, it's gonna happen eventually if you give it enough chances. Trivially includes the mentioning of Gödel's incompleteness theorems.
However, it's also clear what the intent of the original quote was. The pedantry in this case is fair game, since the quote, in an attempt to sound sharp and snappy and relevant, actually obscures what it's trying to say: that Gödel is brought up way too often in philosophical discussions.
Edit: Removed link, wrong reference.
This is not true (and also you mis-apply the Law of large Numbers here). For example: in a series (one single, continuing series!) of coin tosses, the probability that you get a run of heads at least half as long as the overall length of the series (eg ttththtHHHHHHH) is always >0, but it is not guaranteed to happen, no matter how many chances you give it. Even if the number of coin tosses is infinite (whatever that might mean).
Interestingly, I read the original quote differently from you - I thought the intent was to say "any bloody thing will be brought up in a discussion, eventually, if it is long enough, even really obscure stuff like G.I.T.", rather than "Gödel is brought up way too often in philosophical discussions". What did you really mean, nsheppered???
... any event for which you don't change the epsilon such that the sum becomes a convergent series. Or any process with a Markov property. Or any event with a fixed epsilon >0.
That should cover round about any relevant event.
Explain.
Law of Large Numbers states that sum of a large amount of i.i.d variables approaches its mathematical expectation. Roughly speaking, "big samples reliably reveal properties of population".
It doesn't state that "everything can happen in large samples".
Thanks. Memory is more fragile than thought, wrong folder. Updated.
It was the latter. Also I am assuming that you haven't heard of Godwin's law which is what the wording here references.