hi folks,

is anyone of you familiar with the writings and probability concept of george spencer-brown?

while googling my way through the www I found this old page which put me on spencer-brown's tracks.

http://www.bjmath.com/bin-cgi/bjmath.pl?noframes;read=4294


for a start you might like to read the attached pdf file.

cheers

hans

Hans, this is a very interesting article, thanks for uploading it. 

Regarding the falling off of comments at the video sharing website:

QuoteThe example below is from the Vimeo video sharing website in 2007. The video is known
as the 'Flagpole Sitta Lip Dub' and featured an office full of people singing along with a
pop song. It earned more than 400,000 views in its first six weeks. The participation rate as
a percentage of cumulative viewers to date dropped in very orderly fashion. Two rates are
shown, for people who wrote a comment, and those who pressed the 'I like' button.
The comments and 'I like' responses grow steadily rarer over the six-week debut of the
video, falling so rapidly that the rate is noticeably different in the morning and the afternoon
on any given day. This law of mass participation is of tremendous interest and practical
relevance.

This could possibly be explained by the following:

It's not clear whether the counted viewers are unique over time. If they're not - ie; people are viewing the video multiple times, then it's unlikely that they would add comments multiple times. Also, there may be a tendency for later viewers not to post comments if they see that there are many posted already (because they might think that their comment is unlikely to be read). These reasons may go some way toward explaining the phenomena in this particular case, but of course the other examples aren't so easily explained.

hi bayes,

thanks for taking the time to read it. 

I think it's an interesting way to look at probability. and maybe gambler's fallacy is not always as absolute as it comes along.

in his HG-post razor states that he has identified situations in roulette that are more favourable than others. there might be some truth in his statement.

what I also think is remarkble is the fact that results sometimes seem random in some way but if you look at them differently they don't seem to be random at all.

cheers

hans