Q&A: Selective Probability
Selective Probability
Question
I finished your book The Science of Freedom, and there is only one topic that I wasn’t able to fully understand—the probability of choice.
You wrote in the book that each individual has free choice over himself, and yet as a whole there is always some probability by which one can know how many out of a certain group will choose to do a certain thing. If choice is something detached from anything fixed (even though it is influenced by values), how can this be?
Answer
I explained it there. The topographical outline determines the distribution. Each person chooses his own path, but overall the distribution determines the aggregate outcome. It’s like the law of large numbers with a die: each roll is random, but taken together the overall picture will be distributed evenly among the outcomes.