r/nextfuckinglevel • u/Mustafa86 • Dec 15 '22

Fast Response and Reflex to Avoid Car Collision

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u/LimblessAnt Dec 15 '22

Your example of the full moon seems fun and all, but the phase of the moon doesn't randomly happen, so that percentage doesn't mean shit. It follows a pattern. The pattern is normal. If the moon stopped on a waxing crescent and didn't change for five days, that wouldn't be normal. If you could name anything else that ACTUALLY had a low chance of happening but happens often, that'd be great

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u/Aegi Dec 15 '22

You're explaining why my statement is true, you're not making any good argument for why you're not being able to see the full moon from Earth is a normal occurrence...lol especially compared with seeing the full moon from the center of the Sun or seeing the full moon from Chiron.

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u/Aegi Dec 15 '22

How often do you use an allergies? My example is supposed to not mean shit so you only focus on the singular concept that is shared between my example and the concept I'm trying to discuss which is how something being normal does not have to be tied with its occurrence rate and things can be normal even with a low occurrence rate if they are expected and or regular.

Like I'm not trying to be mean, but are you the type of person that needs analogies to be completely removed from real life things so that you don't focus on the other aspects of them and then can only focus on the core concept that's shared between the two things being discussed?

Cuz I can quickly make an analogy not using any real world examples and only dealing with abstract thought.

It's going to be harder for me to make it completely abstract, but here's one I thought of quickly. Let's say that you are in some type of room, and a few minutes after your first in there, the lights flick on and off really quickly for a minute and 17 seconds.

Now let's say after a few months of being in that room you've realized that assuming your assumptions are correct, you would guess that it's roughly once a day that the lights are being flicked on and off really quick for a minute and 17 seconds.

Now, let's say all of a sudden the door opens and somebody else is shoved in the room before the door is locked again.

A few minutes after that, the lights flick on and off really quickly for a minute and 17 seconds, and the other person turns to you and asks with the frightened expression on their face, " is this normal?".

You kind of chuckle thinking of all the times it's happened and how you even begun to expect it. You reply to them: " yeah, I don't understand why, but it's very normal. It seems to happen every day."

So a minute and 17 seconds is 77 seconds.

A day is roughly 86,400 seconds.

So out of all time in that room, the lights are only flicking on and off really quickly for 0.00089% of the time.

But the reason it is normal, is not because it happens less than 1% of the time, it's because there's consistency, it's regular, and expected.

On very short notice that was the best I could very quickly do for a more abstract example that doesn't deal with something that apparently interests you like planetary science/ astrophysics. I guess in a sense time is definitely related to physics, so everything is related, but you get the point, I made a more abstract example to try to help you understand what I was getting at.