Splitting hairs is when the difference is meaningless. The difference we’re discussing is between answering the question and not answering it.

Others in the thread have given an answer that actually makes sense, and it’s that wealthier people who fly frequently tend to fly in smaller private aircrafts, and those are more likely to crash than commercial flights.

I think you’ve lost the context for this conversation. No one’s disputing the reproducibility of QM experiments or for the existence of hidden variables.

The statistical nature of it doesn’t make it any less predictable

Exactly. Similarly, an all-powerful being messing with our world doesn’t mean we can no longer make predictions. We just end up with a model with hidden variables that change over time.

Maybe we use these terms differently in different domains. In my field, stochastic means that repeating the same experiment under the same conditions doesn’t guarantee the same results (e.g. rolling a die). The opposite of stochastic is deterministic. Something that changes depending on the day would be “a function of the date” or something that is “conditional on the date”. This can either be a deterministic function (e.g. calling date.today().day in Python, or a mapping from the date to a uniform distribution ranging from 0 to date.today().day) or a stochastic function (e.g. sample a uniform random integer between 0 and date.today().day).

Edit: I think what you’re talking about is the deterministic mapping from some variable into a distribution. We (as in my field specifically) do sometimes call that “stochastic” too, even though that mapping is deterministic. There may be a bit of terminology overloading here because what we care about in the end is the sample drawn from that distribution, which is actually stochastic.

How do you distinguish axioms from just another parameter of your model? If an all-powerful being is messing with our results, then you just get a stochastic model. In fact, we already have stochastic models in quantum physics. And whether or not the universe is a simulation doesn’t affect the model’s ability to make predictions at all, so why would it matter from a physics perspective? The model would be unchanged either way.

In a world where there are exactly two people who ever fly, that would make sense. Now what if there are 12 people who fly 10 times a year a 1 person who flies 10 times a month? Will it be more likely that someone in the group of 12 dies in a plane crash, or the one person who flies 10 times a month?

Does the concept of an axiom actually exist and make sense in physics? I thought we just had models.

That’s the wrong question to ask. “important people are more likely to be in a plane than unimportant people” is valid as a partial explanation only if we assume that all aircrafts have similar crash probabilities and are flown with a similar number of passengers.

The frequency with which I personally fly does not impact how often other people fly. All it does is give you one data point on how often other people in my situation might fly, and we don’t know how many others are in my situation, so that information is also useless.

We might not learn their names, but we definitely learn about the aircraft and how many people died.

Commercial planes are constantly coming and going through every major airport. Do these wealthy people really collectively fly more than that?

It led them to the right answer. That’s positive reinforcement.

100% of Americans (rounded to the nearest 1%) participate in capitalism. How many of those actually support the system?