#### Posts

2022-03-04: Probabilistic law of the excluded middle

2020-05-04: Archimedes and the sphere

2019-05-16: Glow worms return

2019-04-11: Original memetic sin

2019-01-31: The theory of weight

2018-11-06: Origins of telephone network theory

2018-10-24: Modern thought

2018-09-10: Feeding a controversy

2018-06-11: Glow worm distribution

2018-04-23: Outlawing risk

2017-08-22: A rebuttal on the beauty in applying math

2016-11-02: In search of Theodore von Karman

2016-09-25: Amath Timeline

2016-02-24: Math errors and risk reporting

2016-02-20: Apple VS FBI

2016-02-19: More Zika may be better than less

2016-01-14: Life at the multifurcation

2015-09-28: AI ain't that smart

2015-06-24: MathEpi citation tree

2015-03-31: Too much STEM is bad

2015-03-24: Dawn of the CRISPR age

2015-02-08: Risks and values of microparasite research

2014-11-10: Vaccine mandates and bioethics

2014-10-18: Ebola, travel, president

2014-10-12: Ebola numbers

2014-09-23: More stochastic than?

2014-08-17: Feynman's missing method for third-orders?

2014-07-31: CIA spies even on congress

2014-07-16: Rehm on vaccines

2014-06-20: Random dispersal speeds invasions

2014-04-14: More on fairer markets

2014-02-17: Is life a simulation or a dream?

2014-01-30: PSU should be infosocialist

2014-01-12: The dark house of math

2013-12-24: Cuvier and the birth of extinction

2013-12-17: Risk Resonance

2013-12-15: The cult of the Levy flight

2013-12-09: 2013 Flu Shots at PSU

2013-12-02: Amazon sucker-punches 60 minutes

2013-11-26: Zombies are REAL, Dr. Tyson!

2013-11-22: Crying wolf over synthetic biology?

2013-11-21: Tilting Drake's Equation

2013-11-18: Why $1^\infty != 1$

2013-11-14: 60 Minutes misreport on Benghazi

2013-11-09: Using infinitessimals in vector calculus

2013-11-08: Functional Calculus

## Probabilistic law of the excluded middle

I'm a modeler -- I'm interested in making sense of problems, and thus, my primary interest in tools is in how they help me resolve problems. One of being finite and prioritizing my interests as such is that I am not as deeply an expert in any of the things I would like to be. Most of the time, that's fine, but many interesting questions the I find are precisely interesting because they fall into these interesting (real or apparent) corner cases where the standard tools start to have difficulty.

And so it goes with the title of this post -- I wish I was more of an expert in probability to discuss this, but I have to start somewhere.

I've grown to feel that in mathematics, the law of the excluded middle, while a useful postulate, is one whose invocation needs to be explicit. Proofs by contradiction are useful "bounds", but not as useful as direct constructions, and everybodies' lives will be easier when we know that distinction up-front. And as a modeler, focusing studies on algorithms and constructions rather than contradictions leaves us better prepared to solve new problems.

I suspect the same issue is present in probability theory, but I'm not aware of how it is discussed in that context. Whatever it is, the idea has not seeped into the core curriculum far enough yet to inform my every-day practice. So, I'm raising it as a question.

What is the probabilistic equivalent of the law of excluded middles, what are its consequences, and would avoidance of the excluded middle change probabilistic reasoning and modeling?

I expect this is something that a few people understand deeply already, either explicitly or implicitly, but the rest of us need to understand it better too.