Did you think the similarities between the words 'Cosmic' and 'comic' were an accident?

I've been wondering how some new users have more karma than me. It's like they've been here 7 months but have 37k karma. I feel like I post daily, and I'm at 5.5k CCP. I don't get how people can post so much. Like @eagleshigh has 1105 submission to v/niggers, and he basically doesn't even use this site any more. Meanwhile, I've been posting multiple threads a day, and I only have 752 submissions.

There was some talk about this user base being fictional, being made up of bots.

So I also wondered if the karma scores were also fictional.

I started checking people's karma.

Quickly I detected a pattern. People seemed to have some constant multiple of year to CCP. Like 1.1 years and 1.1k CCP. Or 1.1 years and 2.2k CCP.

So I started to wonder if the algorithm just picked some constant to multiply by the years to create the CCP.

But then I got anomalous data. That would be when someone's year and CCP didn't have a pretty constant coefficient. So I figured those were the real users.

But then sometimes I was curious what the fraction came out to, and I would enter the fraction into my URL bar to get the Google Calculator calculation.

But sometimes there was no repeated pattern, and Google only displays so many digits before rounding the last one.

So I became interested in wondering when the period of fractions forms.

So this caused me to have to go to Wolfram to see the extended decimal expansion.

That answers your first question about why I thought about this ratio.

Then, I've been doing this on users generally, regardless of the thread. So without prejudice, I'd of course do it on this thread also. That answers your second question.

Third, PeaceSeeker had just mentioned the probability of abiogenesis to me recently, so it was "affordable" on my mind. That is, it was ready on my mind to be used when there was an affordance for it. So that answers your third question.

I do not know how to handle probabilities when it comes to infinity.

For example, on the real XY plane, (R^2), pick 3 points randomly. What is the probability that they will all be on the same line?

Or, pick 4 points randomly. What is the probability that parallel lines can be formed from them?

Even, on the real number line, pick a number. What is the probability that that number would be picked? 0. But nevertheless, it was picked.

Or, of the natural numbers, pick a number. What is the probability that this number is even? Half? But the number of odd numbers is infinite, and the number of even numbers is infinite. How do we solve the fraction Infinity/Infinity.

I guess none of that stuff is related to abiogenesis. Whereas, I think the problem with abiogenesis probability is the reference class problem more generally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_class_problem

So I feel that my skepticism toward probability is warranted. Maybe mathematicians know better than me about how to solve probabilities dealing with infinity. Maybe philosophers of science know better than me about how to resolve the reference class problem.

So, in this thread, this probability problem I posed... It's kind of like both of them, right? Well, not the infinite one, unless we consider the number of years to have infinite precision, and also the karma value to be possibly infinite. But those of those are not possible. The year value has finite precision. And the karma value is very small, not even one million.

But then we have the reference class problem here. How many users should we expect this site to have? How would the distribution of this value over that user base look like? What is the probability that those users with those values would be in this thread? What is the probability that two users would have a fraction with the same period? What is the probability that two users would have a fraction with the same period of 28?

These problems are difficult, even if infinities aren't involved, or even if the reference class problem isn't involved.

Just pointing to the difficulty of such a manageable problem ought to humble us regarding our ability to estimate probabilities of some more intractable problem, like abiogenesis.

Regarding this problem...

If we have the year precision to only one decimal place... Then we have 10 * 10 possible values for the year. It has the form x.y where x, y are between {0, 9}. So that's 100 possible values.

And then the karma value. Well let's say, reasonably, no user have more than 100k karma. And if that's false, no user has more than 1m karma.

So then there can only be 100 * 1m possible values for this fraction.

(The x value in x.y can't actually even be 9, since Voat hasn't been around for 9 years. But whatever.)

So then if we assume even distribution over the user base, and assume that any users joining this thread have equal probability...

Then we should be able to calculate the probability that two users will have the same fractional period, as well as be able to calculate the probability that two users will have the same fractional period of 28.

@peaceseeker @heygeorge @niggaskissin

I know why your philosophy professors were not your friends lol.

Maybe because I was a stupid scientismic shit, akin to Dead-Hand.

I have only the most distant acquaintance with number theory, but enough to note that the most trivial or random puzzles can open the portal to the deepest questions. We may be present at the, ah, abiogenesis, of a fundamental new branch of mathematics here.