ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

An Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances

Okay kiddo, have you ever played a game of chance? Let's say you have a coin and you flip it. What do you think the chances are of it landing on heads or tails?

50/50 right? That's what we call probability or the chance of something happening.

Now, what if we flip the coin 10 times and it lands on heads every time? Would you think that's strange? It's still possible, but the probability of that happening is very low.

That's where the doctrine of chances comes in. It's a way of understanding probability and how it works.

But sometimes there are problems with this doctrine. For example, what if we want to know the probability of a certain medical treatment working? We can't just do a coin flip, we need to do experiments and studies to get an accurate answer.

Another problem is when we have incomplete information. Let's say we want to know the probability of it raining tomorrow, but we don't know what the weather forecast says. We can make a guess based on past experiences or what we see outside, but it might not be very accurate.

So, people are always trying to solve these problems to get a better understanding of probability and how to use it in our everyday lives.