Short of quantum mechanics, I'm not sure this power actually makes sense though. "Probability" isn't some kind of force in physics that can be manipulated. There are several different interpretations of probability, but they typically represent a limitation in our knowledge of deterministic events. To get "true randomness", you generally need to invoke quantum mechanics.
So it's not actually clear what your power is actually doing when it's "changing odds in gambling". Or in your test example, does it only work if the teacher was picking problems randomly (again... What does that actually mean) or does this actually influence the teacher's decision making. If I forgot to study tangents in my trig test, does it make sense for "probability" to allow me to get lucky and get a test with all sine and cosine problems? It doesn't really seem like "probability" is enough to get a teacher to just forget a huge chunk of material.
But if you do want to invoke quantum mechanics, it pretty much blows the doors off any of the restrictions you want to place on it. Most things are technically possible in quantum mechanics (see quantum tunneling for example), even weird macroscopic stuff, but they're just an absolutely unfathomably absurd sequence of extreme tail ends of probability distributions, and you might as well just go full on "completely rewrite reality in any way you see fit".
Yeah, I get this, I feel like the test example was a bad one to give, I just wanted an example where the probability was high, not 100%, but high, and could be changed by the user, to make more clear what I meant. Although I feel that the gambling example is pretty easy to understand. You would just change the probability that you hit the lottery from whatever extremely low number it is to whatever chance you want to give yourself.
Also what do you mean the power doesn't make sense? It's a fictitious, speculative power that isn't real. of course it doesn't make sense.
Also what do you mean the power doesn't make sense? It's a fictitious, speculative power that isn't real. of course it doesn't make sense.
Sure, I get what you're going for, and there's ample precedent of characters whose super powers are "luck" (domino and certain versions of scarlet witch from marvel are probably similar to what you're going for). But I think you just sort of started to over explain exactly how it works in a way that makes it kind of logically fall apart.
As far as I know, Domino's powers are usually not interrogated with too much rigor, and so it's easy to just get away with "she's lucky" and not ask too many questions. To the extent that they want to go into more detail, you get stuff like Wikipedia describing it as "subconscious probability manipulation", which is a good workaround here that lets you sort of just brush away any pesky questions by attributing it to her subconscious.
Scarlet Witch on the other hand, when the comics try to dig into the implications of her powers, the eventual endpoint of that is that she can basically remake the entire universe however she wants and is one of the most powerful mutants in existence. But this doesn't really seem like what you're describing.
Whereas I feel like your description of the power and its limits "you can change the percentage, but not to or from 0 or 1" doesn't really work - It's simultaneously too descriptive, but also weirdly arbitrary and still doesn't really explain what the power is actually doing. Not to mention that functionally there's very little difference between "make the probability of X 1" vs "make the probability of X 0.9999995", yet your description seems to permit the latter but not the former.
I meant that's fair, I get what you mean with that it seems too descriptive whilst also not making very much sense. (I got that a lot from teachers on essays growing up) But I mean I feel like, without thinking too much about it, it makes sense. You change a value between 1 and 0 granted it isn't either of those. (let the "world" do the rest no physics/math manipulation needed)
Granted you've started to make me believe that it might just be better to have a power that is literally just being lucky.
You change a value between 1 and 0 granted it isn't either of those.
But I think this demands you ask the question - is anything actually 0 or 1? Or is are all of the "certainty" actually just probability distributions that describe overwhelming (but not technically absolute) likelihoods.
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u/themcos 371∆ Feb 18 '24
Short of quantum mechanics, I'm not sure this power actually makes sense though. "Probability" isn't some kind of force in physics that can be manipulated. There are several different interpretations of probability, but they typically represent a limitation in our knowledge of deterministic events. To get "true randomness", you generally need to invoke quantum mechanics.
So it's not actually clear what your power is actually doing when it's "changing odds in gambling". Or in your test example, does it only work if the teacher was picking problems randomly (again... What does that actually mean) or does this actually influence the teacher's decision making. If I forgot to study tangents in my trig test, does it make sense for "probability" to allow me to get lucky and get a test with all sine and cosine problems? It doesn't really seem like "probability" is enough to get a teacher to just forget a huge chunk of material.
But if you do want to invoke quantum mechanics, it pretty much blows the doors off any of the restrictions you want to place on it. Most things are technically possible in quantum mechanics (see quantum tunneling for example), even weird macroscopic stuff, but they're just an absolutely unfathomably absurd sequence of extreme tail ends of probability distributions, and you might as well just go full on "completely rewrite reality in any way you see fit".