The moment the topic came up, I also thought back to something I once heard a creationist say. Most amusingly, not only did that probability have some fatuously huge order of magnitude, its mantissa was quoted to about 5 decimal places.
One gets ‘target confusion’ in such cases—shall I point out that no engineer would ever quote a probability like that to their boss, on pain of job loss? Shall I ask if my interlocutor even knows what a “power” IS?
Great post!
The moment the topic came up, I also thought back to something I once heard a creationist say. Most amusingly, not only did that probability have some fatuously huge order of magnitude, its mantissa was quoted to about 5 decimal places.
One gets ‘target confusion’ in such cases—shall I point out that no engineer would ever quote a probability like that to their boss, on pain of job loss? Shall I ask if my interlocutor even knows what a “power” IS?