Meteorite just misses skydiver

If that’s sophistry it’s pretty unsophisticated. :smile:

I was looking for somewhere to drive my truck through and that’ll do nicely! A true statement about one thing need not be true about a million such things. An individual lottery ticket buyer is almost certain to not win the jackpot. But every week or so, someone wins the jackpot. The reason is that a million is not equal to one.

You casually (nb. not causally) diss Bayesian inference in the fashionable backlash style, but the actual core theorem of Bayes is utterly uncontroversial. If it’s false then so is basic arithmetic: if you have two phenomena, A and B, and you want to study their coincidence, there are basically four categories: (1) neither happens, (2) A happens, (3) B happens, (4) both A & B happen. Any observed outcome is in exactly one of these categories. You can count them. They must add up to the total number of observations. The count of observations where both happened divided by the count of observations where A happened is “the probability of B given A”, written as P(B|A). It’s just the answer to the question: “Of the observations where A happened, in what proportion did B also happen?” That’s it. It cannot be wrong. No one who can count thinks it is wrong.

Personally I like to think of it as being in both states of being at the same time; it is both a rock and a meteorite at the same time. And a cat.

You’re joking (of course…?) because a meteorite is a subclass of a rock, so to say “it is both a rock and meteorite” would just be a long-winded way of saying “it’s a meteorite”. A thumb is a finger but a finger is not necessarily a thumb. But sadly there are a lot of artsy folk who think that QM is a physical theory in which everything imaginable is equally likely, so whatever randomly chosen fairytale you prefer is somehow lent credibility by QM.