![Wuhan 400 in 1981 [712x480 - 894KB]](https://pic8.co/sh/buLCGV.png){kind=link}
Yeah that is disturbing as shit. I hadnt actually read the passage before.
Let’s try to get a handle on the odds, roughly.
Chance that Koontz would select 2020 out of the years 1990 to 2090: 1 in100
Chance that Koontz would select China rather than another plausible world power with bioweapons capabilities Russia (i know it was russia in the first print.), US, UK, Israel, Pakistan , Iran.....etc: 1 in 10
Chance that Koontz would pick Wuhan over several other large chinese cities: 1 in 20
Chance he would pick a respiratory illness over hemorrhagic or pox like illness etc: 1 in 5
Chance that someone named Li is a whistle blower: 1 in 10
I dont think its remarkable that he descibes a treatment resistent illness, he just likes to employ drama and suspense.
100 * 10 * 20 * 5 * 10 =1,000,000
1 in a million that any particular work of fiction dealing with a “plague” plot would get this much right, roughly.
But how many books of this genre were published in the last 50 years? Probably thousands although few as widely read as Koontz. So that increases the probability of this “coincidence”.
So maybe it’s not as improbable as it would immediately seem.
Maybe there are some other probability defying commonalities here that I have missed. Im sure there’s room to pick on my assumptions, but Im aiming for order of magnitude estimate.
, like to play with probabilities? (Fuck I pinged the wrong goat, sorry not goatfromvoat)
I like this analysis. I did a similar one in my head a few minutes ago, although I didn't do it numerically. Instead, I rationalized the outcome point-by-point. For any single fact, such as the selection of China (and Wuhan, specifically), I was able to come up with what seemed like good reasons. It was the confluence of each of these together, combined with the confluence of each of these real events, that made the whole seem implausible.
I'm no math whiz. I'm sure that you are probably somewhere close with that approximation, but I would just point out that the probability that you estimated is the probability that Koontz selected this particular set of facts from among all of the possible permutations for the whole set. It's another problem to figure out the probability that this scenario would actually occur according to all of those details. I think you'd be talking about a number astronomically larger.
But I would like to point out something I consider interesting: the model assumes that Koontz was selecting at random. Given that he's both human and an artist, we might think that his choices weren't random. Now we've engaged with the problem of trying to show why this or that fact was selected. I'm sure, to an extent, this depends upon the artist. All novelists attempt to create verisimilitude by doing research when it comes to plot points and naming (etc.). Some may be less meticulous than others. I think of a filmmaker like Kubrick who is famous for his absolute obsession with the finest details in every scene of his movies.
I think it's safe to say that Koontz probably didn't pick these facts from out of a hat, so we'd have to start reasoning about why he'd pick them.
For example, maybe even back in the 1980s it was possible to do a little research on China and discover where its main regions of industry were. You'd get from that some short list of candidate cities. And from there, maybe you could find out the most biomedical research in the country was done in Wuhan, even back then.
The date of 2020 could be arbitrary. If an author is trying to keep the future events far enough into the future, while keeping them close enough to be thrilling, 40 years out from the time of writing isn't an awful number.
Of course, you'd need the virus to be global to be truly scary, and for that you need a high rate of transmission that would hold for even highly developed societies where sanitation was state of the art. So a respiratory virus might be the best choice, because a virus that transmits from exposure to feces probably won't blanket the globe.
Maybe it wasn't random, but there were some less-than-impossible reasons an author like Koontz would have picked this set of details. Maybe. It's another issue altogether that in the SAME YEAR the EXACT situation actually pops off as described.
To truly grasp the probability of that, you'd have to know probabilities about today's current events that are probably impossible to establish.
So I think we'd have a different equation here, something closer to:
P(Koontz picks this particular set of details) * P(this particular set of details actually happens as specified)
“Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one. But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.”
― Terry Pratchett, Mort
, is this CSI?
Is that a detachable target?
Did CSI just prove this was designed!?
The target is definitely detachable - the enfolding of this conjunction of events is not determined, necessarily, by this same conjunction having been written in Koontz book.
What is important is whether this conjunction has a complexity exceeding the complex specification criterion of 500 bits - which is well beyond what any unintelligent process could produce - and whether it is in fact specified, namely, conceptually meaningful to an intelligent observer.
I think the meaningfulness is evident. It really comes down to proving the sufficient complexity. I'm not sure how the complex specification criterion, usually expressed in bits, would convert to probabilities. But my inkling is that, if the probability is only as small as 1/1000000, as has posited, then this would be insufficient complexity, since "one in a million" events, that are also meaningful, do routinely occur.
Let me try to math this out, as Shakespeare would say, "anon."
Whats csi?
(post is archived)