We're looking at the best of the best. These athletes - even the ones that finished last - have probably won countless events in their lives and will probably win a lot more.
They will probably get over it just fine. It's ok to be disappointed sometimes, it can even be motivating.
I would generally agree, but i guess the point is, extrapolating about production/growth/pollution when fossil oil was introduced probably failed to account for technological change driving economic and industrial change.
We can measure global warming, it is happening, and we know what drives it right now. We should at least try to model what kind of change would fix it. Including new technologies.
It's not that silly to model as historically that has also happened. To use the "peak oil" example this work also influenced, the technology of fossil oil reserves was a response in part to "peak whale" (not a joke). The main source much commercial 'oil' for things like Street lamps in the 1800s was whale blubber. As whales got overfished fossilised oil reserves were developed and not only took over those markets but created many many new ones.
You can of course make the point fossilised oil is worse for global warming etc but from the point of view of the economy and population growth fossilised oil was much better than whale.
Its not the US but the date of the last well known duel always blows my mind (from Wikipedia):
21 April 1967: The last official duel in the history of France happened between Gaston Defferre and René Ribière, both delegates at the French National Assembly. During an argument in the assembly room, Defferre said to Ribière "shut up, idiot" ("taisez-vous, abruti"). Defferre won the duel after four minutes of sword fighting, wounding his opponent twice.
I don't think you can "remove" information from A probability problem in this way. And even if you could there's no reason to assume it would zero-sum with the later information gain.
Happy to be wrong though, been a long time since i dabbled in probably.
When I did a university security course a few years ago that involved a contest to factor primes those of us who wanted to be competitive had to buy AWS processing time...
This might be a controversial view, but I would argue all storytelling is ultimately an exercise in examining yourself and the context you live in.
Whether the author is aware that that is what they are doing is another matter...