this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2024
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Science Memes

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submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago (4 children)

That's not how percentages work

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (2 children)

Say, there exists 2 humans and 98 bacteria. Consider all cells of a human one life.

50% of ALL life doesn't care which species the life is, and therefore there's a chance that 50 bacteria die. The probability of that happening is 98C50 / 100C50 = 98! 50! 50! / (100! 50! 48!) = (50)(49) / ((100)(99)) = 0.247

For my previous argument, I did not actually do the math. Now that I have done a little bit, the probability seems to converge at 25%

Obviously, this is based on the interpretation of "all life". For my interpretation, "all life" includes every life in a single set, and apply the 50% snap to that. For some others however, it may be interpreted as each species in their own set, and the 50% snap is applied on each set individually.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

But if there are 7 billion humans and n bacteria, and 50% of them are snapped, wouldn't approximately 3.5 billion humans and n/2 bacteria be snapped?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 15 hours ago

The problem is the ambiguity of the statement. Is it 50% of each species? Or is it 50% of all life as one set?

If it's the former case, then sure 3.5b humans and n/2 bacteria gets snapped.

But if it's the latter case, we group all 7b and n bacteria into one set and snap half of them. This 50% can consist of 50% humans + 50% bacteria, but there's also a chance for it to include 0% humans + 100% bacteria. Therefore, the amount of humans snap is a random variable instead of a constant.

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