Yeh, cause I'm waiting for you to propose to me
come on, you know you want me

If you have a 50/50 event repeated 100 times a day for 30 years. That is 2^(100*365*30). Meaning there are 1,199,025,000,000 possible sequences (aka 1.2 billion possibilities in the long form numbering system). That is astronomical and I'm under no illusion that the possible sequences of 3 girls names is equally astronomical.

The point is that neither Mark nor the chicken sexer is guessing, although it feels very much like guessing to both.

I'm not suggesting that Mark has mastered correctly identifying girls names to the same level of accuracy to which a chicken sexer can identify the sex of a day old chick. I'm not aware that anyone ever has been able to do this, nor am I ruling out that it is possible to do so.

The point of the analogies I've presented is to highlight that things which might seem like guesses and even feel like guesses are not left to chance by your brain and the more performances there are (times you guess at something), the more feedback you get (finding out if you were right or wrong), the more revision takes place (your brain refining its theory of the relation between all observable factors and the specific quality you need to identify), the less chance is involved potentially leading to a position where chance is eliminated altogether.

The brain is amazingly efficient at this process, it is doing this 24/7 and does most of it at levels you can not consciously access.

That's pretty cool.

And, it demonstrates that the alternative explanations when faced with an odds defying event like repeated chicken sexing, filling a glass with fluid in the dark, predicting girls names, etc., are broader than it's either pot-luck or some super-natural force. There is in fact something more tangible taking place. The brain, being the most powerfull pattern recogniser ever known, is working constantly to generate theories that narrow down the odds, by assigning probabilistic values to each possibility, and, in any case where there is sufficient experiential data to work with, if there is a pattern, the brain will find it and eventually be able to assign the probability value 1 to a specific outcome in each event. Limited only by our, frankly awesome, senses and the brain's, as yet unknown, limits.


Names are not random, there are observable patterns. If you set your brain the task of finding those patterns, as Mark has, it will.


Peace,

kowalski

point taken.