Re: SF: Areas of confusion, infinity

From: David Kastrup (dak_at_gnu.org)
Date: 04/15/05 

Date: Fri, 15 Apr 2005 11:48:57 +0200

"Proginoskes" <proginoskes@email.msn.com> writes:

> Perhaps a better view of why your "analysis" is wrong is the following:
> Let A be the set of integers evenly divisible by 100, and B the rest of
> the integers. In both cases, A and B are infinite sets, but if you
> choose an integer N at random, uniformly (i.e., the probability of
> choosing any integer is the same as the probability of any other
> number),

Are you sure you should be lecturing others about probability theory?

> you'll find that the probability that N is in A is 1/100, but the
> probability that it's in B is 99/100. This is because the remainder
> of N divided by 100 is as equally likely to be m as n, where m and n
> are any integers between 0 and 99.
>
> If you are going to object to this, I suggest that you sit down with
> a book on number theory, especially one covering p-adic arithmetic.

And I suggest you sit down with a book on probability theory. There
is no uniform distribution over countable sets, and for reasons quite
related to what you are trying to show here. 

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum

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