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I once got up and told a story for The Moth. It was about working with massive datasets and how likely it was that a random number could be the only value to make abs(x) return -x. It turns out that it’s about 1 in 9 quintillion… but it happened 8 times in my task.
I argued that we always say “oh it’s just a 1 in a million shot” to mean we shouldn’t try. My experience with the 1 in 9 quintillion situation is, you give it enough chances, 1 in 9 quintillion can and did happen 8 times.
What are the odds that I’ll get a reply, click with the person, the friendship grows instead of fizzles. Like 1 in a million right?
Like drake equation rare? The Hubble and now the Kepler space telescopes took us from “oh planets are super rare… much less earth sized ones” to “well shit, they’re basically everywhere… including earth sized ones”. It’s all about the numbers!
So what does that look like with posts here? Well this isn’t my first post like this on Reddit. Likely won’t be my last. Each time I will get 0 to maybe 3 at the extreme outside.. those might end in mutual “yeah good luck we are not meant to be”… there may be an occasional - a stochastic - glimmer in an interaction followed by disappointment.
This is all part of the numbers game though. I’m still optimistic. Even through the stochastic disappointment. You should too.
Feel free to tell me that we are not meant to be… or experience stochastic disappointment. Maybe you’re neither and reply. I’m waiting for you.
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