I [Kevin Roose] had never before attended a business conference with a 28 percent chance of an orgy.
Do we know if this is actually true? He’s been to South by Southwest (photographed there on his Wikipedia page) and has covered tech and finance, fields that seem to me like they contain orgy-enjoyers.
I am confident he means he’s never been to an event where there was a transparent signal that there was at least a 28% chance. If other events were higher he either didn’t know or couldn’t argue it credibly.
If he’s ever attended an event which started out with less than a 28% chance of orgy, which then went on to have an orgy, then that statement is false by the Intermediate Value Theorem, since there would have been an instant in time where the probability of the event crossed 28%.
Oh, true! I was going to reply that since probability is just a function of a physical system, and the physical system is continuous, then probability is continuous… but if you change an integer variable in C from 35 to 5343 or whatever, there’s no real sense in which the variable goes through all intermediate values, even if the laws of physics are continuous.
Razied’s sibling argument isn’t literally quite right, but the spirit is: he’s probably been to several conferences, the chances of orgies happening have changed during them, etc.
Also “precisely 28%” is a type error when talking about market prices with some transaction cost (and where the price is truncated to two significant digits) - you probably want to read it as “28% plus or minus a couple percentage points”.
Do we know if this is actually true? He’s been to South by Southwest (photographed there on his Wikipedia page) and has covered tech and finance, fields that seem to me like they contain orgy-enjoyers.
Perhaps he means precisely 28%. I think it’s unlikely that he attended a conference with that precise probability.
I am confident he means he’s never been to an event where there was a transparent signal that there was at least a 28% chance. If other events were higher he either didn’t know or couldn’t argue it credibly.
I agree that your first sentence was likely his intention, but it’s not what he wrote, and I suspect what he wrote is false.
If he’s ever attended an event which started out with less than a 28% chance of orgy, which then went on to have an orgy, then that statement is false by the Intermediate Value Theorem, since there would have been an instant in time where the probability of the event crossed 28%.
That’s only true if the probability is a continuous function—perhaps the probability instantaneously went from below 28% to above 28%.
Oh, true! I was going to reply that since probability is just a function of a physical system, and the physical system is continuous, then probability is continuous… but if you change an integer variable in C from 35 to 5343 or whatever, there’s no real sense in which the variable goes through all intermediate values, even if the laws of physics are continuous.
Razied’s sibling argument isn’t literally quite right, but the spirit is: he’s probably been to several conferences, the chances of orgies happening have changed during them, etc.
Also “precisely 28%” is a type error when talking about market prices with some transaction cost (and where the price is truncated to two significant digits) - you probably want to read it as “28% plus or minus a couple percentage points”.
Maybe he meant that at South by Southwest the chance is higher than 28%?