[ipnon]

I just watched Patlabor 2 last night, about a civil war in post-Cold War Japan. The main theme is the following: The thing about one-in-a-million events is that they are eventually going to happen once the other 999,999 occur. Thus a government which does not plan for one-in-a-million scenarios is truly derelict and incapable of survival.

[xg15]

> The thing about one-in-a-million events is that they are eventually going to happen once the other 999,999 occur.

Nitpick: I get your point, but phrasing it like this is basically the gambler's fallacy. That's not how probability works.

You could ask though if, given the changed environment, the one-in-a-million event still has the odds of one-in-a-million. Or if one-in-a-million is really such a rare thing if you make a billion draws...

[mdp2021]

Better formulation:

a one-in-a-million event that is tried a million times has a ~63% chance of happening.

[fsckboy]

yes, that doesn't suffer from gambler's fallacy, but actually surprises people and makes them forget about the issue you're talking about and focus on the probabilities that they don't understand and have no tools to understand... and that's when the 1 in a million event takes place, while they are distracted

[mdp2021]

> that they don't understand and have no tools to understand

Why are they not scholarized? What are they doing in the wild? There's an infestation and it is mentioned marginally, as opposed to red-level crisis?!

> while they are distracted

They should be trained towards the conditions for focus pre-emptively!

[orf]

We live in the real world though. As you know.

[mdp2021]

Yes Orb, and it's a problem, and that's why we engineer! ;)

[eiffel31]

“Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one. But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.”

(The author is left as an exercise for the reader)

[ipnon]

The movie asks what is the point of JSDF if Japan isn’t under any threat … then somebody in an F-16 fires a TV guided missile into the Yokohama Bay Bridge. It’s a good movie, you should watch it.

[xg15]

Sounds good indeed!

[daneel_w]

Fantastic movie, great political plot, great direction. Part 1 is decent, too.

[EasyMark]

That’s not really how odds work. I could take 1,000,000 cycles or 10,000,000 cycles or even more for a 1/1,000,000 to happen.

[HPsquared]

I put the odds at least 10% this century.