Talk:Littlewood's law

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 Exemplar Sententia. 04:05, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

The latter sentence above is complete non-sense. The source via which you access an article is completely irrelevant to the comments you may/should leave.130.225.20.24 (talk) 18:40, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

The first sentence, however, makes perfect sense. Moreover, almost every submission on this page seems to assume that Littlewood's law is a mathematical theorem, rather than a joke with a serious undertone. Although one might think that this should not be necessary, it appears that perhaps this should be pointed out in the article. AlexFekken (talk) 03:46, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Definition?

Littlewood's Law supposes these miracles to happen individually? Perhaps a more in depth explanation is due, seems like questionable math to me. I'd also be interested in hearing some examples of these so-called miracles if Littlewood acknowledges their existence.

Caarth 06:01, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Piffle

This particular rendering of Littlewoods law is seriously flawed. The only way to make it can make sense is to say: 'If a person makes 1 prediction (of an event with a 1 in a million probability) every second for 35 days, then they will probably be right once' Deglog 20:19, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

I have a v v bad headcold at the moment, so I may have hallucinated this. 1) 60 (seconds) x 60 x 24 x 35 (days) ~= 3,000,000; 2) 1: 1,000,000 < 3,000,000 by a factor of three, obviously; 3) So the upshot of this is that if you make three million predictive guesses at odds of a million-to-one, then it's probable (i.e., better than evens) that you'll be right on one of them. Am I missing some dramatic subtlety here? Isn't this a "law" akin to saying that "Nice Things Are Better Than Nasty Things"? Garrick92 11:33, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Littlewood says we're only actively "experiencing" things for a third of each day. 78.32.91.33 (talk) 17:34, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

There should be a critique on this page, the definition of miracle is flawed. Littlewood makes the assumption based on his own particular reasoning that a miracle is any event that has a one in million chance of occuring. I don't know how widespread this view is, but it seems to me that the generally accepted view of a miracle is completely unexplainable and arguably illogical event. obvious examples would include raising the dead, levitation, disease disapearing without any scientific explanation etc.Colin 8 19:19, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

Folks, this "Law" is obviously intended only as a rough approximation. It's also very obvious that people very commonly use the word "miracle" in a general sense.

• http://www.google.com/search?q=%22it%27s+a+miracle%22+police+paramedic
• http://www.google.com/search?q=%22miraculous+escape%22

The person who survives the air crash/ship sinking/earthquake/tsunami/bombing/shooting/dangerous disease appears on TV saying, "It's a miracle! Praise the Flying Spaghetti Monster!" The other 99 or 999 or 9999 people who got killed by the same cause don't get to express their opinions on the matter. -- Writtenonsand (talk) 23:51, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

A new section on "Criticism" is called for to discuss several flaws with this hypothesis. The definition is flawed, the probabilities are flawed, etc. Rlsheehan (talk) 19:58, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Dodgy Probabilistics?

I'm no mathematician, but as explained it seems deeply flawed. To work that way, wouldn't each of the 1,000,000 "events" have to be completely independent, not causally linked to one another as actual experiences are? If I'm in my room at instant A, alone, with the door closed, unmiraculously reading a book, surely the likelihood of something "miraculous" happening within my realm of experience at instant A+1 is next to nil, since I'm (practically speaking) in a small, closed system with a limited number of physical objects whose properties (other than those of me myself) are highly static and predictable. - 65.213.77.129 (talk) 20:37, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

i suppose that is covered by saying 'the average person', as opposed to specifying hermits who never leave their rooms. i suppose he could specify it as only applying to people who experience things. however, even in your self-described isolation booth, there are still millions of possible miracles that could occur. you just naturally reject their likelihood because they are, after all, miraculous. --65.31.193.126 (talk) 23:59, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

The real dodgy probability is the definition - aside from 1:1000000 odds being kind of low for miracles, saying something has 1:1000000 odds doesn't mean that it occurs every 1000000 otherwise independent events in a persons' life: it means when you try to accomplish it, you fail 999999 times out a 1000000. The law of really big numbers still makes his larger point, but this "law" and the monthly rate is just arguing from misleading definition. -114.91.64.248 (talk) 01:12, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

Er... it is not our place to criticise Littlewood's concept of a miracle. If reliable sources exist that detail such a critique, then use those in the article. Fences and windows (talk) 17:58, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

Your criticism is correct, but it would count as original research to note that, for people whose lives change significantly more on the order of hours than seconds, they should only expect a miraculous event every five lifetimes or so. 24.173.186.26 (talk) 21:50, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

The actual probability of a one in a million event happening in one million events is ~63.21% using(1-P)^n. So there's a greater than a third of a chance of the "miracle" event not occurring in the 35 days. There's also about 26.42% chance of at least two such events happening. Seems strange that a mathematician publishing such an anecdote would be satisfied with an "on average" guess when calculating the actual probability would be child's play (I'm assuming Cambridge had a calculator capable of executing exponents during Littlewood's tenure). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.60.65.170 (talk) 16:27, 31 October 2015 (UTC)

Littlewood's Law: Not By Littlewood?

I did some looking into the source and as far as I can tell, Littlewood never said anything even close to "Littlewood's Law of Miracles", and definitely not in the claimed source (the Miscellany). Freeman Dyson seems to have com up with it as a variant on the Law of Truly Large Numbers. Since they are so similar in the first place, a merge might be warranted. --Gwern (contribs) 01:04 17 February 2019 (GMT)

Year in preamble. Littlewood died in 1977.

The preamble to the article states that this "law" was "framed by... Littlewood in 1986." However, Littlewood died nine years earlier in 1977. Perhaps whoever wrote this meant that the "framing" or publication was posthumous. Whatever the intended meaning of the sentence is, I think some clarification is needed. GibbNotGibbs (talk) 11:41, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

Along with Gwern's comment above, it seems like the anecdote Dyson told had many basic inaccuracies, to the point where at least heavy revision is appropriate, if not a merge. Piotr iskander (talk) 08:22, 17 September 2024 (UTC)