A direction that is 99.99% accurate survives this argument completely. For all practical purposes one does not need totality.

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customguy 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

For a one time coin flip, sure. For a lot of them, depending on the stakes, that can be very, very wrong.

https://www.google.com/search?q=why+99.99+accuracy+is+not+en...

It doesn't take a lot of thought experiments to realize this. Imagine if every bite of food we eat had a 0.01% chance to turn into something instantly lethal in our mouth. Average lifespans would be reduced measurably, and apart from anxiety, we'd develop all sorts of strategies and laws around that. E.g. absolutely NO eating for airplane pilots. You wouldn't go on a date to have dinner, dancing and sex, you'd go dancing and have sex, and then have breakfast. People would modify their jaws and stomachs so they could eat less, but bigger chunks of food. It would be a whole thing!

And that's not even talking about water changing on us, or a tiny chance of getting sucked into the toilet whenever we use it, and a lot of other things where going from damn near 100% to 99.99% would change everything for the worse, by so much.

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voxl 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A basic course in statistics will inform you of why a 99.99% accurate test should be looked at with skepticism when diagnosing a rare disease. Yet we see the fancy 9s and think somehow this many 9s is enough.

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ziofill 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Sure, but that’s not what we are talking about

	▲	ulrikrasmussen an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Diagnosis of rare diseases is a subset of "true" statements, no?

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elendilm 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Really? Laws of probability works against your argument.

Such a basic course in statistics needs to be scrutinized.

	▲	californical an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Every breath you take, there is a 99.99% chance that everything is normal, and a 0.01% chance that you breathe mild acid which horribly burns and causes a massive coughing fit. It probably don’t cause long term damage unless that breath happened to be more important than normal, like while driving right as a child runs into the road. Would you act differently knowing that you had one of these occasional acid breaths? Even if it only happened once per day on average (0.001%)