Probabilities can be counterintuitive. Just because something has a low probability doesn’t mean it never happens. You can make those probabilities vanishingly small by stacking specific combinations like ethnic background, first language, country of origin, current country of residence, religious upbringing, and so on. The more you stack, the lower the probability of someone being exactly like you.
I once visited a science expo that demonstrated this by asking questions about traits like eye color, ear shape, and even quirks: Do you write with your left hand? Do you kick a ball with your right foot? Do you peek through a hole with your left eye? When you combine all these factors, everyone turns out to be a “unique” snowflake.
The counterintuitive thing is, even though the stacked probability of you existing might be astronomically small, you’re still here. Unlikely things happen all the time. If you expect to see a specific rare event, you’ll be waiting a million years. If you look at events that have already occurred, you’ll find their probabilities were just as tiny.
When you think of it like that… an NSA agent can read through all my posts and, without even needing to get my IP, they could uniquely identify me by cross referencing their database.
I mean who else in the world is (these are already info I’ve posted here and am comfortable with publishing… I don’t care about hiding this):
Born in China
Somehow survive One Child Policy as the 2nd child
Immigrated to the US
Speaks Cantonese and Mandarin with Taishan Ancestry
Literally just these 4 datapoints narrow down to like… probably no more than like 100 people (I assume, I don’t have the stats)
Then you filter for: everything else like age… citizenship… how long been here… cities lived in… favorite Animes, Movies, TV shows…
Bingo, I’m the only one that matches that…
Hello NSA, ya got me! 👀
(Assuming the info is real… who knows… maybe I obfuscated some details…)
I wanna publish a memoir some day so I’ll just see how unique/intriguing my story is… 👀
Probabilities can be counterintuitive. Just because something has a low probability doesn’t mean it never happens. You can make those probabilities vanishingly small by stacking specific combinations like ethnic background, first language, country of origin, current country of residence, religious upbringing, and so on. The more you stack, the lower the probability of someone being exactly like you.
I once visited a science expo that demonstrated this by asking questions about traits like eye color, ear shape, and even quirks: Do you write with your left hand? Do you kick a ball with your right foot? Do you peek through a hole with your left eye? When you combine all these factors, everyone turns out to be a “unique” snowflake.
The counterintuitive thing is, even though the stacked probability of you existing might be astronomically small, you’re still here. Unlikely things happen all the time. If you expect to see a specific rare event, you’ll be waiting a million years. If you look at events that have already occurred, you’ll find their probabilities were just as tiny.
When you think of it like that… an NSA agent can read through all my posts and, without even needing to get my IP, they could uniquely identify me by cross referencing their database.
I mean who else in the world is (these are already info I’ve posted here and am comfortable with publishing… I don’t care about hiding this):
Literally just these 4 datapoints narrow down to like… probably no more than like 100 people (I assume, I don’t have the stats)
Then you filter for: everything else like age… citizenship… how long been here… cities lived in… favorite Animes, Movies, TV shows…
Bingo, I’m the only one that matches that…
Hello NSA, ya got me! 👀
(Assuming the info is real… who knows… maybe I obfuscated some details…)
I wanna publish a memoir some day so I’ll just see how unique/intriguing my story is… 👀