I’m not in love
So don’t forget it
It’s just a silly phase I’m going through
And just because
I call you up
Don’t get me wrong,
Don’t think you’ve got it made
I’m not in love, no no,
It’s because. — 10cc
Evan Warfel writes:
I have a Valentine’s day post / topic / idea for you, which I hope is early enough to make it into the queue in time. Lately, the pandemic has forced many of us to (implicitly) consider how we use Bayesian probability to decide what is true and accurate as the information surrounding Covid-19 rapidly updates. As I’ve been thinking about this, my mind goes to the oft cited notion that there is no such thing as perfect certainty, statistically speaking. And though people can quibble about the minimum size of just-noticeable-differences between .99 and 1, it has occured to me that to the extent that a Bayesian probability reflects a state of mind, a heart-felt “I love you” is one of the only statements to which the receiver can assign a probability of 1.
This is an interesting point.
At first I was going to say that you can’t really assign probability 1 to a statement such as, “I love you,” given that some large fraction of marriages end in divorce, also aren’t there all those “Lifetime movies” based on a true story where the spouse is actually a killer?
But then I realized that the statement being held with probability 1 is not “We’ll be together forever”; it’s the subjective (“heart-felt”) feeling of “I love you.” And there is a way in which it’s hard to have a 99% feeling of love. Just like you can’t 99% jump off the diving board. Once you’re in the air, you’ve fully committed.
So I’d say that Warfel’s remark is not quite a statement of probability; it’s more about conditionality in decision making. For another example, consider a math problem where you’re given a statement X, and the task is to either prove that it’s true or come up with a counterexample. It’s hard to solve this without committing, and the usual recommended approach is to first assume the theorem is true with a heart-felt 100% probability and then prove it, then if that doesn’t work assume the theorem is false with a heart-felt 100% probability and then find a counterexample. It can be hard to do either of these without putting yourself in that frame of certainty.
To return to the Valentine’s Day point: yes, there does seem to be something about the heart-felt “I love you” which requires that 100% commitment. Some emotional states have that, some don’t.
from my recollection of an algebraic topology exams 50+ years ago including 5 prove or give a counter-example problems: it was more like:
start off trying to prove the statement when you get stuck
try to use the reason you got stuck to generate a counter-example when that fails, try to use the reason it failed to get past the block in your proof repeat as needed
I do not recall doing this while actually doing math.
Bah, humbug. “I love you” is not really a testable proposition. Although a proposition may follow.
There are traps everywhee, The loved “you” has to be identified with the addressed “you.” Good luck with that. At best, the loved “you” is the fitting of a model to data, and models are always wrong. And is the “I” the same model applied to a different data set, or an entirely different model? Does that quesiton even make sense given the huge difference in the data sets between “I” and “You?”
Am I talking too much?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seBInAPI32A
There is, however, a probability associated with whether the person actually said “I love you”, or whether you misheard it. Until advances in audio technology very recently put my misconception to bed, I had always wondered why, in the middle of that 10cc song, someone started whispering the command, “Be poised and quiet!”