BtZ42 Section 9 (pp 53-60): the sieve of chance

[Mark Kohut]

Monte:
"Given GR's association of rockets and death, the Roman sieve and the
supposed healing power of the stalks that grow through it is is a totally
fucking brilliant touch."

Right on. Still half-surprises me at every reading yet............it IS
f***ing brilliant. New healing green under the same distribution as the
rockets...The novel is not SO DARK that there is not a natural
Counterforce......or Counterforce in Nature even. Which might not fully
bloom until Against the Day.

On Fri, May 13, 2016 at 8:09 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> P. 56:
>
> “But squares that have already* had* several hits, I mean—”
>
> “I’m sorry. That’s the Monte Carlo Fallacy..."
>
>
> At the wiki, contributor MD defines it as:
>
>
> The belief that if events have deviated from our expectations of chance in
> one direction, they are bound to deviate in the opposite direction soon, as
> if to compensate. The name is drawn from a famous event at the Monte Carlo
> Casino in 1913, when a roulette ball settled on black 26 times in a row --
> and the casino grew richer as more and more patrons bet on red,
> anticipating a "rebound." [
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler's_fallacy ]
>
> As Roger patiently explains, no rocket is influenced by what previous
> rockets have done, any more than the roulette ball was influenced by what
> it had done on a previous spin -- or 25 previous spins -- of the wheel. The
> Poisson distribution depends on the assumption that events in a data set
> are genuinely random and independent -- i.e. that in this case, there is no
> systematic "skew" in how the V-2s are aimed and launched, or in the many
> manufacturing and environmental variables that affect their trajectory and
> scatter their impacts around the target point.
>
>
> *
>
>
> Those Monte Carlo bettors may have been misled by their intuition of a
> valid statistical principle, the law of large numbers: "The average of the
> results obtained from a large number of trials should be close to the
> expected value, and will tend to become closer as more trials are
> performed." E.g.,  getting tails from a flipped coin six out of ten times
> isn't remarkable at all -- but 60 out of 100 is less likely, and 600,000
> out of 1,000,000 is vanishingly unlikely.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers
>
>
> Where the bettors went wrong was that 26 spins of a roulette wheel simply
> isn't that large a number. The brain doesn't store or process quantitative
> data well enough to be very good at this kind of thing "on the fly,"
> especially when something important is at stake (money at Monte Carlo, life
> or death under the scatter of V-2s)... which is why statistics were
> developed in the first place.
>
>
> Note Roger's search for a pen at 56.28: "reaching for pocket after pocket,
> why are there never any damned... ah here..." Of course "never" is absurd,
> Roger; you're just annoyed. (BTW, have you ever noticed it's always in the
> last pocket you check?)
>
>
> Given GR's association of rockets and death, the Roman sieve and the
> supposed healing power of the stalks that grow through it is is a totally
> fucking brilliant touch.
>
>
> "his face often grows chalky and clouded, as behind the smudged glass of a
> railway carriage window as vaguely silvered barriers come down, spaces
> slide in to separate him that much more, thinning further his loneliness. "
>
>
> We learned about trains and barriers from the Evacuation nightmare. And
> while "thinning his loneliness" might seem ambiguous or imprecise here, it
> will be somewhere in the back of our minds when Slothrop is slivered away
> into Postwar.
>
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