Does probability exist?

a large part of human belief about future events rests on the frequency with which they or similar events have occurred in the past.

But the point is that when you’re trying to work out how likely something is, what we need to talk about is the number of outcomes – the number of outcomes that result in whatever it is you’re talking about, and the total number of possible outcomes. This was, I think it’s fair to say, the first real formalisation of the idea of ‘probability’.

Many of the probabilistic questions with which people are concerned belong to one of the following types: What is the probability that object A belongs to class B? What is the probability that event A originates from process B? What is the probability that process B will generate event A?

Successfully thinking in shades of probability means roughly identifying what matters, coming up with a sense of the odds, doing a check on our assumptions, and then making a decision. We can act with a higher level of certainty in complex, unpredictable situations. We can never know the future with exact precision. Probabilistic thinking is an ext

The thing with all these predictions is that they are uncertain. The universe may or may not be deterministic; perhaps if we had perfect, God-like knowledge of the position, movement and qualities of every particle in the universe, we could perfectly predict everything, the fall of every sparrow. But we don’t. Instead, we have partial information.

Clearly the calculation of a single probability is not the answer to all questions. A probability itself is a measure and needs a basis for comparison. And clearly some restriction on allowable hypotheses is needed, or else a self-fulfilling hypothesis such as “the data are preordained” would give probability one to any data set.