Right, the OP was talking simple odds, but the thread shifted to talking about plane crashes I think we exit the realm where simple odds apply. It makes sense when we're talking about dice.

The issue when it applies to the real world is that you rarely get truly independent events. And also probability is based on assumed knowledge (or lack thereof), so gaining information changes probabilities.

An example is you have a shuffled deck of cards, and you're betting on the odds of the top card being an Ace of Hearts. The probability at this point is 1/52. If you happened to notice a flash of red as the dealer was shuffling, nothing about the deck changed, but now your odds are 1/26 because of additional knowledge.

If the first place crash revealed some information that wasn't available before, that can change the probability calculation, even if nothing else changed about the situation.

Also in a theoretical situation you accept the circumstances presented as fact. In the real world, those assumptions could be wrong, or someone could be flat out lying to you. Like if someone flipped a could 25 times and it landed on heads every time, mathematically you'd say you still have 50/50 for the next toss. But you are assuming that it is indeed a fair coin and not a weighted or double-headed coin. If you want into someone on the street taking bets, you have to factor in not just the odds at face value, but also the odds that they're cheating.

>functions send the program to another line of code but then return back to the line the function is called from once the function is done.

Except for when Exceptions are thrown, but I guess that's why they're called Exceptions :p (I actually don't know if that's the reason, I probably just made that up) But even Exceptions propagate up a call stack in a predictable manner.

As an aside, it blew my mind when I found out that in ASP.NET, redirects happen by internally throwing a ThreadAbortException behind the scenes that can't be handled by normal means. It made sense that code after calling redirect didn't execute, and the only way to have code behave that way is if an Exception is thrown, I just never put two and two together.

>He advocated instead for what he called "structured programming" which is really just programming as anyone born after maybe 1964 understands it.

I don't know why this part made me laugh so much! But yeah, it was revolutionary at the time, but now it's considered very basic fundamentals.