Talk:Expectation (philosophy)

Some thoughts

Expectation may differ from person to person. Everybody in the world has some expectations. Expectations increases creativeness of a person. An Expectation may or may not be realistic. Expectation has its own merits and demerits. If something expected happened it is a surprise else it is a disappointment. Always, try to expect more to get things done. An expectation is something we look forward to happening. Example, "I expect you to graduate from high school on time." This is saying that I look forward to seeing you graduate on time. Example, "I expect you to find a job and support yourself." This means I look forward to seeing you get a job and start supporting yourself.

By Trichur Ganesh. Chennai.

Anyone care about this article?

My expectation was that this would redirect to expected value. The value of THIS article is, as I see it, very little. A redirect would be better. Graft | talk 20:21, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Actually, the 'see also' section is very useful if you want to look something up related to expectations, but you don't know the name of what you're looking for. You need somewhere to start searching, and this page is one of those good starting points. VDZ (talk) 20:17, 25 July 2008 (UTC)

"See also" list

While I do support the existence of this article, I don't really see the point of at least half of the "see also" links. (I mean, seriously, "Charm"? "Evil eye"??) How about a big cleanup of these? Nieske 09:02, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

Undue weight

Struck a strangely lengthy (double the size of all other prose) section dedicated to coverage of some likely non-notable 1991 scholarly text. No harm in revisiting the topic in a less bulky format after expanding the article as a whole, but please do not rv - Would be little different from spamming. MrZaius^talk 17:12, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

Requested move 28 September 2024

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: not moved. (non-admin closure) Arnav Bhate (talk • contribs) 05:45, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

---

• Expectation (epistemic) → Expectation
• Expectation → Expectation (disambiguation)

– According to Cambridge Dictionary, the primary meaning of "expectation" refers to the psychological concept of anticipating something to happen. The other entries listed on the disambiguation page have a more specific names like expectation–maximization algorithm. Therefore, it seems logical to move the psychological concept to the more concise title, which would also resolve another issue: the parenthetical addition. Typically, we use a noun as a disambiguator (e.g., anticipation (genetics), stress (mechanics)) rather than adjectives. Additionally, it’s challenging to attribute this concept to a single scientific field—whether psychology, philosophy, or epistemology—so how should we specify it? For all other meanings, we can simply just add a disambiguation hatnote to the lead of the current expectation (epistemic) page. –Tobias (talk) 20:19, 28 September 2024 (UTC) — Relisting. -- Maddy from Celeste (WAVEDASH) 21:55, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

• Oppose This might be the primary dictionary definition, but it is not the primary encyclopedic topic. The mathematical sense is just as important. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 18:32, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

  I agree with that, and the mathematical concept has a different name, which naturally disambiguates it without interfering with this one. –Tobias (talk) 19:11, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

• Support per nom. Clear primary topic. -- Necrothesp (talk) 11:35, 3 October 2024 (UTC)
• Oppose. Wikinav [1] suggests that most outgoing page views go to Expected value. Much more than Expectation (epistemic). (And the fact that expected value is titled that way instead of, say Expectation (mathematics), doesn't detract from this type of evidence.) Adumbrativus (talk) 21:25, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

  It somewhat does. You're absolutely right—the page views of expected value are significantly higher than those of expectation (epistemic). Nonetheless, an expected value isn't an expectation, and it already has its own disambiguation page (expected value (disambiguation)), which makes it irrelevant to this discussion. You can add it to the "see more" section of the current expectation disambiguation page if you want, but it still doesn't play a role here. –Tobias (talk) 03:04, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

  Perhaps I should clarify what Wikinav is to explain why it's clearly against Expectation (epistemic) being the primary topic. The data describes how many times people followed a link from one page to another. See meta:Research:Wikipedia clickstream about the data source. The data [2] say that, out of the people who visited the disambiguation page Expectation, only 18% of the people who followed a link followed the link Expectation (epistemic).

  This is a separate statistic from a page's total number of page views. As we all agree, page views of Expectation (epistemic) are also much lower than Expected value (even more lopsidedly [3]), but the totals have the problem that they include viewers from any source, including people who weren't originally searching for the term "expectation". The clickstream data doesn't have this problem – it only includes people who actually went from Expectation. The data set has other kinds of limitations (e.g. what to think of users who didn't follow any link), but there's no way of slicing it to turn Expectation (epistemic) into the primary topic. Adumbrativus (talk) 21:41, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

  I understand your point, but "expectation (epistemic)" can still be the primary topic. You focused on only half the numbers—there are also pages from which users navigated to "expected value", numbers that center on the target page, and they show that only 1.08 % of all visitors to "expected value" were referred from "expectation" versus 6.89 % to "expectation (epistemic), which makes it a little difficult to view it as encyclopedically relevant to the term "expectation". Moreover, we can't assert the encyclopedic relevance based solely on user behavior and link-clicking patterns, which is why I currently don't see the point in this approach.

  However, the bigger issue, as I mentioned earlier, is the thematic difference. Expected value (disambiguation) may sound similar, but has not much to do with an "expectation", regardless of view counts. The phonetic resemblance might justify inclusion of the disambiguation page in the "see also" section at best. To exaggerate, it would be like adding Cleopatra to the disambiguation page just because her article is more popular than everything else listed. It’s simply another topic with its own disambiguation page that doesn't belong here. –Tobias (talk) 15:03, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

  @Tobiasi0: I don't understand how you arrived at that conclusion. The article on Expected value states in the first sentence that it is also called expectation, and it uses "expected value" and "expectation" interchangeably throughout the body. jlwoodwa (talk) 23:07, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

  User behavior only matters when it addresses the first prong of WP:PRIMARYTOPIC. A topic is primary for a term with respect to usage if it is highly likely—much more likely than any other single topic, and more likely than all the other topics combined—to be the topic sought when a reader searches for that term. The relevant set consists of readers searching for the term "expectation": out of those readers, most do not seek the article Expectation (epistemic). Your measurement misuses clickstream data by mistaking P(A|B) for P(B|A) in the usage criterion.

  On the second prong of PRIMARYTOPIC, mathematical expectation is not of lesser long-term significance.

  Like jlwoodwa, I don't understand your idea about the terminology. In mathematics, expected value is expectation. Two names for the same concept. The claim that "an expected value isn't an expectation", and that one "has not much to do with" the other, is wrong. Adumbrativus (talk) 00:58, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

• Oppose per WP:PTOPIC. Fails WP:PT1 per Adumbrativus; for WP:PT2, I don't see why this article would have "substantially greater enduring notability and educational value" (cf. King of Hearts's oppose Tobias's reply to it). And it is not a WP:CONCEPTDAB covering the other topics. SilverLocust 💬 06:15, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.