two quotes from The Science of Everyday Thinking: measurement, and probability

.

Two quotes from The Science of Everyday Thinking:

The difficulty of measurement doesn't keep you from having beliefs, only from testing them. -- staff of The Science of Everyday thinking

My editorial comment is -- "Well, doesn't KEEP you from testing them, but does make it harder....."



Persi Diaconis is a Stanford statistician who has spent his career collecting and studying examples of coincidence.  Given that there are 280 million people in the United States, he says, "280 times a day, a one-in-a-million shot is going to occur."

My editorial comment on the second quote -- "Duh...  and ... wow.  Obvious (if you happen to think of it), but ... sort of mind-blowing, too......."  Hmmm.....

Further comment:  "Imprecise.  How about 'On average, a one-in-a-million shot is going to occur 280 times a day.' "

Let's extend it -- with over 7 billion people on the planet, one would expect about 7 billion-to-one shots, on average.................. 

Hmmm.  Thinking about this more ... why would we think million-to-one shots happen every day?  What is a reasonable time frame?  Not arguing with the premise, just wondering...........

Getting myself all tangled up in the likelihood of various things, and wondering how that plays into this....

Ok -- went looking (I love Google!) -- here's a New York Times article about Diaconis and coincidence and random chance.  (It's an interesting article.....)

Here we find the answer to my question:

So if something happens to only one in a million people per day and the population of the United States is 280 million, "you expect 280 amazing coincidences every day."

The answer to my question is -- the likelihood of the "amazing coincidence" is defined in the original statement, but the definition was left out of the class quote.  (Oops!)

So -- the precise thought would be:  "If something happens to only one in a million people per day, and the population of the United States is 280 million, you expect (on average) 280 amazing coincidences (in the USA) every day."

One event per person per day.  280 million people, one day = 280 million person/days.

Given the Earth's population of over 7 billion, each day is 7 billion person/days.  So if something happens to only one in a billion people per day, we'd expect (on average), about 7 even more amazing coincidences every day.

At 7 billion person/days per day, it only takes us  about 143 days to get to the on-average 1-in-a-trillion event.....



Wow.

.