1An Introduction to Probability
Predicting the Future
The term Predicting the Future conjures up images of veiled women staring into hazy crystal balls or bearded men with darting eyes passing their hands over cups of tea leaves or something else equally humorously mysterious. We call these people fortune tellers, and relegate their professions to the regime of carnival side‐show entertainment, along with snake charmers and the like. For party entertainment, we bring out a Ouija board; everyone sits around the board in a circle and watches the board extract its mysterious energy from our hands while it answers questions about things‐to‐come.
On the one hand, we all seem to have firm ideas about the future based on consistent patterns of events that we have observed. We are pretty sure that there will be a tomorrow, and that our clocks will all run at the same rate tomorrow as they did today. If we look in the newspaper (or these days, on the Internet), we can find out what time the sun will rise and set tomorrow – and it would be difficult to find someone willing to place a bet that this information is not accurate. On the other hand, whether or not you will meet the love of your life tomorrow is not something you expect to see accurately predicted in the newspaper.
We seem willing to classify predictions of future events into categories of the knowable and the unknowable. The latter category is left to carnival fortune tellers to illuminate. The former category includes predictions ...
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