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0 pointsIzkata2y ago0 comments

Right, half is not "pretty much". Its meaning is more like "mostly", that's why it fits the above. It's something like, that situation is common enough it should be your base assumption when talking theoreticals.

For example, if you have 9 boys and 1 girl in a room, and pick one at random, you're not guaranteed to get a boy, but you're pretty much guaranteed to get a boy. It's a wishy-washy way of saying the most likely outcome by a decent margin.

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noaccountusueh2y ago· 2 in thread

The post you replied to said “they're not both girls”. That’s 75% not half.

Weirdly though, “it's pretty much guaranteed that they're not both girls” sounds unacceptable to me, but “it's pretty much guaranteed that at least one of them is a boy” sounds ok-ish, even though they’re equivalent.

Nevermark2y ago

“Big” and “small” shift their meaning in context in ways we are aware of, and not aware of.

Things like “almost always”, “nearly guaranteed”, “effectively never” also adjust their meaning relative to context in ways we are not aware of.

There isn’t a solution to different people having different instincts about these numbers, except being aware of the issue, and not trying to project one person’s intuitions as being the “right” intuitions.

thaumasiotes2y ago

I strongly suspect that what's going on here is not that a bunch of commenters are happy to agree with statements like "in craps, you're pretty much guaranteed not to roll 7" or "when you hit in blackjack, you're pretty much guaranteed not to get a face card".

Rather, they're making the statements they do because they feel that 17 one-in-seventeen chances must add up to one 100% chance, or because they can't tell the difference between 50% and 75%, and they don't feel like checking to see whether the things they're saying make any sense.

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