going to do then well the general principle ideally we'd find a general principle that always applies and in the case of the thumbtack experiments still simplifies and gives us the same solution we already know so how can we generalize this notion that we were just counting to get our best estimate well there's something called likelihood so imagine we observe eight up to down and let's say the probability of up we call theta then we're going to say you know what's the probability of a sequence that we observe maybe we have up down