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Re:The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Conditional Probabilities by wirrbel on Wednesday February 22, 2023 @02:50PM (#34901611)
Conditional probabilities are reasonably effective because they are the mathematical underpinning of probabilities.

They are not unreasonable effective.

It's just that sampling from probability distributions is computationally expensive, which has lead to the development of frequentist statistics (as opposed to Bayesian statistics). Frequentist statistics is unreasonably effective, since it makes so many assumptions that its hard to do a frequentist statistical analysis without violating some of the assumptions the methods have with regards to the data distributions, etc.

Re:The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Conditional Probabilities by password11 on Wednesday February 22, 2023 @05:39PM (#34904017)
The original "unreasonable effectiveness" article was at least partially an argument that mathematics was fundamental to reality and the physical universe in a philosophical sense.

> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectivene...

> It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here, quite comparable in its striking nature to the miracle that the human mind can string a thousand arguments together without getting itself into contradictions, or to the two miracles of laws of nature and of the human mind's capacity to divine them.

This seems like a well written but misleadingly titled article. The title implies the article will make an argument about the philosophy of statistics, but the article is basically just saying "conditional probabilities are useful" without further speculation as to why they're so useful. As parent comment suggested, a likely reason for its effectiveness is that this is applied mathematics so we should not think it unreasonable that conditional probability is effective.