I once got tricked into watching What The Bleep Do We Know in a cinema. I still feel dirty and disgusted. That Dispenza retard was apparently also involved but he didn't stand out among the other bull****.
When we went to a meditation course last year we got some reading material that immediately struck me as dumb ****ing rubbish and of course it turned out to be excerpt from that ****s books.

Ah I see what you mean! That's not how probability works though
For instance, I can't have ten toes without having nine, but still I'm more likely to have ten toes

And ten starts with a 1!

Just kidding.

Benford’s Law doesn’t apply when the likelihood of the final total is heavily skewed. It wouldn’t apply to average height in feet either.

As far as “that’s not how probability works though” that may be where we hit a brick wall because I only understand probabilities well enough to do high school level word problems. My gut response is it doesn’t matter how probability works because that’s how numbers work and the proof is in the pudding.

Since my explanation doesn’t satisfy you or as far as I know pretty much anybody who knows anything about math, riddle me this: If I’m wrong, why the **** does Benford’s Law pan out?

I didn't look too deep into it but I think that it goes like this. Forgive any sloppy phrasing.

If a set of several numbers goes as high as 1 (f. ex a set of five numbers being {1,1,1,1,1}), the number 1 will be 100 percent of the numbers in the set. If that set goes as high as 2 (ex: {1,1,1,2,2,2}), the number 1 will 50 percent of the numbers in the set. If that set goes to 9, then the number 1 will be a smaller piece of that pie. Once a set begins to reach double digits, the distance from 10 to 20 is 100 percent of what it took to get from 1 to 10, so the process repeats and the likelihood of 1 being the leading integer decreases as the highest number in a set approaches 100. Then that applies to hundreds, thousands, etc.

Blending all of that into an average makes 1 the overall most likely leading integer.

Probability doesn't work like that because Bernard's law assumes linearity and requires a framework based on how our base-10 scale operates. So Bernard's law looks at the way that we construct numbers while probability looks at how the chips fall and the likelihood of them falling that way. It's not a useless concept but I don't think that it's useful in all applications because number systems are a language and language has flaws (quirks might be a nicer word for it). It's more useful for things like coding where they're connecting a binary system to a base-10 system, I'm probably incorrectly assuming.

Right?

@hawk Yes, that makes a difference. I was thinking that constants like the speed of light have a physical meaning which determines their value, but of course the fact that constants appear in physics has to do with our choice of units, so essentially our arbitrary units are what determines their value. In that sense it differs from counting sheep or toes. Its more appropriate to view them as random factors gluing equations together, I don't really know how that would explain this law but it's intriguing, I'll try to look into it

@Frown I think that's correct!

If that’s not what I communicated I failed because that’s what I was trying to say.

**** math and **** all y'all

even elph?

is that a real question?