Make way for everyone's favourite popular mathematical statement:
A butterfly flapping its wings in Tokyo, causes a tornado in California.
Chaos theory. Should this fact inspire you do run around with a flamethrower, attemping to exterminate all of the evil tornado acusing butterflies? No, of course not! Any mathematician will quickly inform you of your misunderstanding of the principle.
A butterfly will "prevent" a tornado just as often as it "causes" one. Hence killing butterflies will have precisely no effect on stopping tornados.
If you are faced with a situation of save boy who cannot pay for treatment, or leave him to rot, you can weigh up your options in statistical terms fairly easily:
The thought occurs to you "maybe I shouldn't save him, he may grow up to be a ruthless dictator"
Well how many people in the last few hundred years have actually been a ruthless dictator? A handful. How many peole have truned out to be normal members of society? A couple of billion.
Therefore the odds of this boy turning into a maniacal killer are infinitismal, so your decision to save the boy should not be impaired by this possibility.
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Last edited by CSflim; 10-02-2003 at 03:44 PM..
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