Maarten <maarten@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Tuesday 04 January 2005 13:44, Peter T. Breuer wrote: > > Michael Tokarev <mjt@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Hm, Peter, you did it again. At the very end of an admittedly interesting > discussion you come out with the baseless assumptions and conclusions. > Just when I was prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt... :-(. > > Anyway, strictly speaking, the answer to your question is "yes". It > > does not decrease the probability, and therefore it increases it. The > > question is by how much, and that is unanswerable. > > You continue to amaze me. If it does not decrease, it automatically > increases ?? Yes. > What happened to the "stays equal" possibility ? It's included in the "automatically increases". But anyway, it's neglible. Any particular precise outcome (such as "stays precisely the same") is neglibly likely in a cntinuous universe. Probability distributions are only stated to "almost everywhere" equivalence, since they are fundamentally just measures on the universe, so we can't even talk about "=", properly speaking. > Do you exclusively use ">" and "<" instead of "=" in your math too ? No. I use >= and <=, since I said "increases" and "decreases". > Maybe the increase is zero. Exactly. > Oh wait, it could even be negative, right ? Just No, I said "increases". I would have said "strictly increases" or "properly increases" if I had meant "<" and not "<=". But I didn't bother to distinguish since the distinction is unimportant, and unmeasurable (in the frmal sense), and besides I wuldn't ever distinguish between < and <= in such situations. > as with probability. So it possibly has an increase of, say, -0.5 ? > (see how easy it is to confuse people ?) No. I am very exact! Automatically, I may add. But anyway, it doesn't matter, since the possibility of the probabilities being unaffected is zero in any situation where there is a real causal mechanism acting to influence them, with a continuous range of outcomes (hey, computers are random, right?). So you may deduce (correctly) that in all likelihood the probability that we were speaking of is _strictly_ increased by the mechanism we were discussing. If you care. Whatever it was. Or is. Really! I do expect a certain minimum of numericity! :(. Peter - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
