NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test Is a Smashing Success

Re:NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test Is a Smashing Suc... by wcoenen on Sunday January 15, 2023 @07:02AM (#34388781)

Imagine you are kidnapped and knocked unconscious. Then you wake up in a prison cell by yourself. You are now wearing a prison uniform with a label that says "prisoner N", where N is some number.

Would it really be "trickery with probabilities" to say that there is only a one-in-thousand chance that the total number of prisoners is more than 1000*N? And that the real number of total prisoners is probably much closer to N?

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Re:NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test Is a Smashing Suc... by 317070 on Monday January 16, 2023 @01:58AM (#34397712)

Yes to the first question!

The distribution representing my beliefs in such a scenario would not have a finite variance.

Given the question, are you aware of the Pareto distribution? Nassim Taleb has great work explaining fat-tail distributions.

(I do have strong priors on various things, such as the size of the human population and the sizes of large prisons, which I ignore here as they break the metaphore)

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