[HN Gopher] What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
___________________________________________________________________
What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
Author : ksec
Score : 261 points
Date : 2024-01-07 07:05 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.stat.berkeley.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.stat.berkeley.edu)
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Picking a random integer between 1 and 1 million.
| onion2k wrote:
| That depends on the quality of your randomness. If it's a
| person picking the number that definitely isn't a 1 in a
| million chance for most numbers. You need to get pretty
| specialized hardware before you can confidently say it's
| definitely an equal chance for every number every time.
| kortilla wrote:
| No, you don't need specialized hardware. The output of a
| modern hash for crypto absolutely needs to produce a uniform
| distribution across a million.
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| But how do you pick the input for the hash?
| danbruc wrote:
| Current date and time.
| coldtea wrote:
| Just bang away at the full keyboard for 50-100
| characters?
| speedgoose wrote:
| You need a seed, and a previous hash. The seed is usually
| sourced from another random generator, that uses
| environmental noise and some (salted) hashing as well.
|
| In practice, a precise clock and a few difficult to guess
| events like keyboard and mouse inputs are enough to get a
| descent seed.
| p51ngh wrote:
| Do you mean, after picking a million numbers, then every
| number in the range should have been picked exactly once?
| jbstack wrote:
| Definitely not this. That wouldn't be random at all. For
| example, after picking 999,999 numbers you would be able
| to predict the next number with certainty. What it means
| is that every time you select a number, every number in
| the range has an equal probability of being selected.
| dtgriscom wrote:
| Which means that there must be more state in the
| generator than is output as a random number; otherwise
| each time number X was produced then number Y would
| follow it. (Perhaps obvious, but I like stating the
| obvious.)
| kortilla wrote:
| No, each number has a 1 in a 1,000,000 chance each time
| the generator is used.
| Tainnor wrote:
| That's not a uniform distribution. Probability doesn't
| remember previous state, so the chance of picking the
| number 241 out of 1 million numbers remains exactly the
| same after picking 241 once. In particular, the chance of
| getting no duplicate numbers if you pick a million times,
| is very close to zero.
| Tainnor wrote:
| Technically, it's not actually uniform, or "random" - it
| only has to be indistinguishable from random, e.g. if you
| had access to a true random source and a pseudo-random one,
| it should be computationally infeasible to distinguish
| them.
| nine_k wrote:
| Given a finite amount of sample.values, you can always
| find a polynomial to match the values.
|
| You can only proclaim that something is "truly random" on
| epistemological grounds, assuming that true randomness is
| somehow exposed by the universe. This holds under quantum
| physics, but not under classical mechanics. Unless there
| is some quantum effect, RNGs based on fluid dynamics,
| like lava lamps, may be completely deterministic, we just
| don't know how to set their initial conditions precisely
| enough.to reproduce a phase trajectory.
| adrianN wrote:
| Your polynomial has no predictive value in almost all
| cases.
| nine_k wrote:
| Yes. Finding out the nature of a PRNG and its initial
| state would allow one to predict next values, at least
| theoretically, that is, if it can be computed faster than
| the values are generated by the process we're looking at.
|
| But the presence or absence of such a function for a
| naturally occurring process is, again, an epistemological
| question. That is, whether we can reverse-engineer the
| universe deeply enough. Unless we find its source code,
| we're stuck with retrofitting some formulas, and a
| "random process" is such for which we can't retrofit any
| better description than a statistical one.
| Tainnor wrote:
| You're right that we can never find conclusive empirical
| evidence for something being truly random, but we _can_
| say with confidence that a PRNG is not random because we
| can look at the algorithm.
| misja111 wrote:
| It still is a 1 in a million chance if you have no a priori
| knowledge about the way the random numbers are distributed.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _If it 's a person picking the number that definitely isn't
| a 1 in a million chance for most numbers._
|
| Only if the person isn't aware of the issues involved.
| ackbar03 wrote:
| How bout this guy
|
| https://images.app.goo.gl/aqh2AP5tj7JBkVKZ9
| HL33tibCe7 wrote:
| I think true randomness was implied in GP's comment. A person
| picking a number "randomly" from a million is not random in
| the mathematical sense.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| There's no evidence of true randomness though. There's only
| evidence of us having missing information to do the
| prediction of what any RNG would offer us next.
| whartung wrote:
| It would be interesting what kind of clustering (if any)
| there would be if 1 million people were asked to pick a
| number between 1 and a million.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Nope, picking a random integer between zero and one million and
| one would be though.
| CodingThunder wrote:
| I am seeing this same/similar comment on this thread which has
| been posted by three quite new accounts. Is this quite normal
| on HN now or is it some bots farming engagement? Btw, I'm a new
| member here, knew about HN since a long time but never bothered
| to make an account up until now
| dtgriscom wrote:
| Looks like one old-ish account with a number of submissions
| and comments, and two very-similarly-named copycats that are
| getting voted down to oblivion. Not very common here, but it
| happens.
| CodingThunder wrote:
| One of them seems to have deleted the comment just as I
| commented about this. Also downvoting is an option? It
| doesn't seem to be visible here.
| fnordian_slip wrote:
| Downvoting is only available to users above a certain
| karma threshold, I believe around 500 or so.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >Is this quite normal on HN now or is it some bots farming
| engagement?
|
| As you can see, my account is not new. I thought the comment
| will be funny. Not every comment should be terribly
| ingenious, long thought and crafted to show people how smart
| the commenter is. As a commenter you have the right to be
| spontaneous.
| CodingThunder wrote:
| > As you can see, my account is not new. I thought the
| comment will be funny.
|
| Yeah I did find it funny, no doubt. Was just asking of
| general culture here
| oyekanonline wrote:
| Picking an integer between 1 and 1000000 without replacement.
| hollowpython wrote:
| Winning rock-paper-scissors enough times against cgpgray:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PmWQmZXYd74
| trojan13 wrote:
| Being Dealt a Royal Flush in Poker. NO but pretty close.
|
| Being Born on February 29th. NO
| appstorelottery wrote:
| Royal flush in poker is more like 1 in 6493. ;-)
| OJFord wrote:
| How did you get there? GP is talking about being _dealt_ it,
| I think you 've calculated the chance of it occurring in a
| round or something?
|
| Wikipedia has GP's at 649739, so yeah 'almost' a million,
| roughly speaking. 4 / ((52 nCr 5) - (4 nCr 1)). (Four suits,
| one way to do it in each suit, deck of 52, five card hand.)
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| In games where hands are made from 5 out of 7 cards (e.g.
| texas hold'em), the odds are 30,939:1
|
| I can't think of any common form of poker where it would be
| ~6000:1
| coldtea wrote:
| A lottery with 1 million tickets?
|
| Winning ~3-4 times at the roulette when betting on numbers?
| Scarblac wrote:
| > "Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so
| patently absurd actually existing are millions to one. But
| magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up
| nine times out of ten."
|
| -- Terry Pratchett
|
| Making fun of the fact that if someone says "it's a million-to-
| one chance, but it might just work!" in fiction, you know it's
| going to work.
|
| In _Guards! Guards!_ this is taken to the point that they reckon
| that it's not enough to hit the dragon with the arrow at the soft
| spot, they also have to try a whole bunch of improbable
| circumstances to get the chance to exactly 1 in a million.
| Because exactly 1 in a million is hard to achieve, as the article
| shows.
| eesmith wrote:
| See also https://wiki.lspace.org/Million-to-one_chance and more
| generally
| https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MillionToOneChan...
| .
| thriftwy wrote:
| I was thinking of loading the dice in some CRPG so thar if some
| event has exactly 1/1,000,000 chance then resolve it as if it
| was 9/10.
| Tade0 wrote:
| They had a point there, even if not realising it, as that
| world's rules conform not to regular physics but the general
| population's beliefs.
| TomK32 wrote:
| The cheese-loving aviators have the Swiss-cheese-model to
| visualize how small unimportant errors can stack up to a
| catastrophic outcome. Though in my opinion there's a flaw in
| this thinking as no sane cheese seller would shuffle their
| layers of cheese after cutting them: Hence 1-in-million chances
| happen all the time. https://www.aviationfile.com/swiss-cheese-
| model/
| cduzz wrote:
| You'd think that but the Toledo fondue flood of 1973 says
| otherwise.
|
| I can't find the wiki link, but Ronald O'Sullivan, who'd just
| taken over his father's cheese shop, was attempting to make a
| single block of swiss after a long week of selling the first
| 80% of several blocks to different restaurants. He took those
| cheese tails and stacked them up, not realizing the dangers
| he was putting everyone else in. It was later found that
| there were several other contributing factors; he hadn't used
| a properly certified cheese cutting blade (baloney!) and had
| reused the wax liner to store the off-cuts prior to
| reassembling the cheese that ultimately failed.
|
| Some say you can still smell the swiss on hot august days.
| lazystar wrote:
| Need a source on this, please. It sounds real at first
| look, but I cant find any links and it's very similar to
| the boston molasses flood of 1918 story, especially that
| last bit -
|
| "The event entered local folklore and residents reported
| for decades afterwards that the area still smelled of
| molasses on hot summer days."
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Molasses_Flood
| cduzz wrote:
| It's 100% made up. It's an attempt to make fun of people
| who would consider it unlikely that anyone would ever
| stack cheese as a way to mitigate safety risks.
| unbalancedevh wrote:
| 'I can't find the wiki link" was a good clue. I'll have
| to remember that line next time I'm kidding someone!
| throwup238 wrote:
| Fondue can't cause a flood like the Great Molasses Flood
| because it's not capable of truly fully laminar flows.
|
| Fondue is a colloidal suspension of cheese solids in a
| mixture of wine and melting agents and it shows complex
| rheological behavior. Unlike Newtonian fluids, where
| viscosity remains constant regardless of the applied
| shear rate, fondue demonstrates non-Newtonian features,
| especially shear-thinning. As the shear rate increases,
| its viscosity decreases, a phenomenon attributed to the
| alignment of colloidal particles in the direction of
| flow, interfering with the fluid and preventing it from
| filling every nook and cranny like a flood would.
|
| Fondue's inability to achieve truly laminar flow is
| rooted in its viscoelastic properties. When subjected to
| stress, fondue exhibits both viscous and elastic
| characteristics, a behavior modeled by the Maxwell model
| in rheology. This model combines a viscous damper and an
| elastic spring to describe the material's response to
| applied stress. As fondue is subjected to shear stress,
| its structure becomes disrupted, leading to a breakdown
| in its ability to maintain a cohesive flow front. This
| disruption manifests as a turbulent flow, preventing the
| formation of a flood-like scenario similar to that caused
| by molasses.
| blantonl wrote:
| I am a pilot, and in aviation related topics pilots tend to
| be almost ridiculously pedantic about stuff.
|
| I want to congratulate you on writing the most pedantic thing
| I've ever read in my life. Truly a masterpiece. I can't wait
| to bust this out in my next aviation related discussion.
| jameshart wrote:
| I don't know if I've ever seen it investigated as a
| mathematical puzzle but there's probably some interesting
| number stuff to be found in investigating the mathematics of
| an idealized swiss cheese risk model.
|
| If you take a series of unit squares and from each one remove
| a random circle (ah, the origin of every protracted
| probability argument among mathematicians: a random circle
| selected _from which distribution_?), then stack them up...
| after _n_ squares, what is the expected hole size? Or how
| many squares do you need to stack to reduce the hole size to
| below a particular threshold?
|
| Circle intersection geometry is hard though. Probably easier
| to start with axis aligned square holes, which are what you
| get when you make your Swiss cheese out of milk from
| spherical cows.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| No, you get axis-aligned square holes when you get your
| milk from cubical cows.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| Cows are spherical
| blt wrote:
| I'm glad I'm not the only one bothered by the implied slice
| shuffling in this "model". Lol! We need to think of another
| real world setting where a stack of randomly hole-filled
| sheets would be naturally shuffled.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Punch cards? Might be a few years out of date to be readily
| imagined by an average member of the public.
| dstick wrote:
| GNU Terry!
| trgn wrote:
| I reread Eric this weekend, somewhat on a whim. Real
| pleasure. I also had totally forgotten he came up with the
| premise of the Good Place. He had such so many ideas.
| jampekka wrote:
| TFA: "If you tossed the coins [20 tails in a row] then the
| first answer would be NO, unless I'm very confident you lack
| the ability to fool me ... "
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| Yeah, what does this even mean? Isn't coin flipping a random
| process?
| ascorbic wrote:
| I read it as meaning that there's a much better chance that
| you're able to perform a trick, so the chance is the
| probability of filpping them for real, plus the chance of
| you being able to perform a trick to make it seem that you
| have.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| In general no, it is a chaotic system, and humans are just
| bad at consistency.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2004/02/24/1697475/the-not-so-random-
| coi...
| supernewton wrote:
| Anecdotally, with practice, some people can flip a coin to
| a desired outcome like 65% of the time. And .65^20 is only
| around 1 in 10,000.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| You flip the coin, catch it, then present it on the back
| of your other hand.
|
| With a bit of training you can feel the coin with your
| thumb when catching it to make sure you present the
| desired side. If you do it quickly enough people won't
| see you do it. The trick requires coins that have sides
| that feel distinctive.
| inasio wrote:
| Million-to-one chances are a running theme in a few of his
| books, but aiming specifically for it as in Guards, Guards! is
| one of the better awesome things in the Discworld
| ldigas wrote:
| "Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so
| patently absurd actually existing are millions to one. But
| magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up
| nine times out of ten." -- Terry Pratchett, Mort
| Toutouxc wrote:
| > If we guess a President will serve on average about 6 years,
| then 1 in 6 times 4.0 million = 24 million babies will someday be
| President.
|
| This sentence desperately needs parentheses. Took me five minutes
| to parse correctly.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| To save some time for the rest of us:
|
| > If we guess a President will serve on average about 6 years,
| then [1 in (6 times 4.0 million =) 24 million] babies will
| someday be President.
| esrauch wrote:
| I prefer the interpretation of an ominous prediction that the
| presidency will be filled by 24 million babies someday soon.
|
| Switzerland does have a committee of 7 people as president,
| only a small step from that to 24 million babies.
| JBiserkov wrote:
| The intelligence of current generation of "AI" has been
| compared to a baby's, so... ;-)
| egeozcan wrote:
| Of course it's a very small step to make babies amounting
| to 3 times the current population of Switzerland (so
| assuming roughly a 50/50 female/male divide, everyone needs
| to make 6 babies on average, in the same year so they will
| still all be babies when the last one is born? that's
| probably impossible for the females but we are already way
| into the science-fiction category) and put them all in a
| committee.
|
| The more I think about this, the funnier and more
| complicated this gets.
| column wrote:
| What do you mean, "that's *probably* impossible" to make
| 6 babies from the same mother in a single year? Takes
| about 9 months to output a human, you know?
| CapitalistCartr wrote:
| Ha! Nine women can have that baby in one month;
| management says so.
| kgwgk wrote:
| > Takes about 9 months to output a human, you know?
|
| It can also be done months faster getting multiple humans
| though.
| jrm415 wrote:
| It's not impossible to have sextuplets.
|
| It's probably impossible for a population to average that
| rate though.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I was once informed that everybody has eaten at least eight
| spiders in their sleep. Another person in the same car
| confidently confirmed:
|
| > It's true, if you're on you deathbed and you've only
| eaten one spider seven more come along and jump right in
| there at that last second.
|
| I figured it was that sort of reasoning that got us to 24
| million babies.
| Bluem00 wrote:
| This particular "fact" actually has a known source.
| Someone made it up as an example of the kinds of things
| people will believe: https://www.snopes.com/fact-
| check/swallow-spiders/
| rbits wrote:
| I just assumed they had a mini stroke, I didn't realise there
| was a way for that to make sense
| magic_hamster wrote:
| This was a nice read. Takes me back to Probability 101, which was
| a fairly eye opening experience, not only because of you get to
| learn the basis of a lot of research (sampling, deviation, etc)
| but also because of the many counter intuitive behaviors of
| actual randomness. It was a little bit like learning the physics
| of math, if that makes sense.
| amelius wrote:
| Hash collisions ...
| austin-cheney wrote:
| I used to tell people I was an order of magnitude more likely to
| die from a traffic related accident driving to work than from any
| hostile action during the two years I was in Afghanistan. People
| seemed challenged by that.
| ttyprintk wrote:
| Reminds me of Jared Diamond explaining why he might not have
| taken a shower:
|
| https://archive.ph/fNeaH
|
| HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5145268
| epolanski wrote:
| You weren't joking, and actually it's much more than a
| magnitude.
|
| The chances of dying in a traffic accident in US are between
| 0.9 and 1.2%, whereas the mortality rate of US military
| servicemen in Afghanistan has been below 0.004%.
|
| That's 3 order of magnitudes.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| 1.2% is over the lifetime. Don't know what the 0.0004% figure
| means, but in the active war phase coalition forces sustained
| 1-2%/year fatalities rate in Afghanistan https://academic.oup
| .com/ije/article/36/4/841/670068?login=f....
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Probably because they are different time frames. Your chances
| of dying in Afghanistan are over say a 4 year period. When
| someone says you have a 1% chance of dying in a car accident,
| that's spread over a lifetime. The chance of someone dying in a
| car accident in that 4 year period is much lower.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| This often remains true even over smaller scales. For instance,
| between 2009 to 2012 I was in a combined arms battalion that
| deployed to Iraq twice and we experienced three deaths in
| combat and nine in traffic accidents near Fort Hood during
| those years. Another drowned in a lake near post. Also, one
| death due to suicide in theater.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I think getting killed by a meteorite is in that order of
| magnitude.
|
| But it is a bit of a tricky question. Because you can get hit by
| a small space rock, it has already happened but it is extremely
| rare, much less than 1 in a million, and I don't know if there is
| a record of anyone dying from it. But there is also a small
| chance of a massive impact killing billions in our lifetime, and
| intermediate scale events like if the Tunguska event happened in
| a populated area.
| nine_k wrote:
| There are records of people killed by meteorites, literally in
| single digits.
|
| A simple statistical test would give you an idea. With 10B
| people on Earth, a "one in a million per lifetime chance" would
| happen to 10M people during their lifetimes. If we
| optimistically assume that a lifetime is 100 years, and the
| chances do not change with age, the event would affect 100k
| people every year.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| hmm, looks like someone forgot how many millions are in a
| billion. Those millennials.
| Snow_Falls wrote:
| Your calculation is wrong, there are a thousand millions to
| the billion. If there was a 1/1,000,000 chance across 10
| billion people, it would be 10,000 people affected.
| nine_k wrote:
| You are correct, and I am not!
|
| Then the "one in a million per lifetime" chance would be an
| event that happens to about a hundred people every year, on
| average.
|
| Winning a big lottery is within the right ballpark. Flying
| to space is definitely more rare.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| It was fun to see this near-adjacent to the submission below. I
| wonder if one answers the other!
|
| > Q > What has a 1 in a million chance
|
| > A > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38907620
| nabla9 wrote:
| "Not in a million years"-something that might happen once in a
| million years for an individual-happens over 8000 times per year
| for people on earth. Many of them have smartphones with camera to
| record the event. That's why we have an actual video where quick
| brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
| ithkuil wrote:
| My chance of dying because of a dinosaur-estinction-event-class
| asteroid hit is one in a 65 million years, thus every two and a
| half days on average a random person on earth dies being hit by
| an asteroid of that size.
| davefol wrote:
| This implies that your death and all others are not
| correlated. I'd argue that if an asteroid hits the death
| correlation is almost 1.
| ithkuil wrote:
| I wanted to say the same thing but I attempted to use an
| intuition pump
| its_ethan wrote:
| I think that's what he's trying to point out
| nonameiguess wrote:
| This is quite a good point. People often fail to make the
| distinction between something that happens once every million
| years to all individual organisms separately versus something
| that happens once ever million years to the planet itself.
| Our language is usually ambiguous about this.
| supernewton wrote:
| Similarly, Vatican City has slightly less than 6 popes per
| square mile.
| feintruled wrote:
| Had to search for that video, I love things like this. I was
| not disappointed, so thanks for that. Really tickled me.
| Doesn't displace my favourite though:
| https://www.thewestmorlandgazette.co.uk/news/6922546.bull-br...
| pitdicker wrote:
| It may be nice to know the safety factors used for structural
| engineering of homes, offices and other regular buildings in the
| EU.
|
| The Eurocode defines 3 consequence classes: CC1, CC2 and CC3. CC1
| has the lowest consequence and is used for regular homes, light
| industry and agriculture. The chance of dying as a result of
| structural failure is low, 0.001. The chance for a CC2 building
| (apartment buildings, offices, hotels etc.) is defined as
| moderate with 0.03. And CC3 is for special buildings, such as
| large stadiums, with a high risk of death on structural failure,
| 0.3. There are other factors that go in defining a consequence
| class however, including economic and social concerns.
|
| The consequence class maps to the chance that we find it
| acceptable for a building to collapse in a given year. Causes can
| be anything, like extreme weather. For CC1 this is 1 in 100, for
| CC2 1 in 10.000, for CC3 a chance of 1 in 100.000.
|
| So the chance one or more people die in a stadium during a heavy
| storm due to structural failure could be 1 in 300.000 in a year
| if you purely look at the statistics behind the structural safety
| standard.
|
| The statistics map to simple reference values for the loads of
| wind, snow, rain, usage etc. and easy safety factors. For example
| CC2 has a safety factor of 1,5 over all variable loads.
| sd9 wrote:
| > The chance for a CC2 building (apartment buildings, offices,
| hotels etc.) is defined as moderate with 0.03
|
| Does this mean 3% or 0.03%?
| pitdicker wrote:
| If a CC2 building collapses, the expectation is that in only
| about 3% of the cases this leads to someone dying. I don't
| know the complete reasoning, but can imagine some factors of
| why this number is far below 100%: a building is not always
| in use, there are often warning signs with time to escape,
| and collapse can be localized (not the whole building).
| sd9 wrote:
| Makes sense, so this is confounded by the number of people
| in the building.
|
| 30% for a CC3 seemed high to me initially (hence wondering
| if 0.3 really meant 0.3%). But since it actually means "in
| 30% of structural failures in CC3 buildings (e.g. a
| stadium), at least one person dies", it make much more
| sense because there are probably lots of people in the
| stadium.
| Snow_Falls wrote:
| I agree, it would likely have extremely diminishing
| returns in terms of lives saved to have more stringent
| safety requirements. Needs to be a balance after all.
| Recursing wrote:
| Reminds me of https://markxu.com/strong-evidence
|
| <<One time, someone asked me what my name was. I said, "Mark Xu."
| Afterward, they probably believed my name was "Mark Xu." I'm
| guessing they would have happily accepted a bet at 20:1 odds that
| my driver's license would say "Mark Xu" on it.
|
| The prior odds that someone's name is "Mark Xu" are generously
| 1:1,000,000. Posterior odds of 20:1 implies that the odds ratio
| of me saying "Mark Xu" is 20,000,000:1, or roughly 24 bits of
| evidence. That's a lot of evidence.>>
|
| <<Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but
| extraordinary evidence might be more common than you think.>>
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Someone offering that bet though would also alter the odds
| though. Because why would someone offer such a ridiculous bet
| after you've told your name, unless they had special
| information about your name? Although it being a possible
| YouTube prank channel would make it also possible that you
| actually have a chance to win for the reactions.
| strken wrote:
| This is part of a very important principle: if someone
| approaches you about something, you should be far more
| suspicious than if you had randomly picked someone off the
| street.
|
| The most well known application of this is teaching kids to
| ask a random shopkeeper for help if they get lost, but to not
| get in a stranger's car when offered a lift.
| fenomas wrote:
| > One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to show
| you a brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet
| broken. Then this guy is going to offer to bet you that he
| can make the jack of spades jump out of this brand-new deck
| of cards and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, do not
| accept this bet, because as sure as you stand there, you're
| going to wind up with an ear full of cider.
|
| _(Guys and Dolls)_
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Also good advice for dating!
|
| If an attractive lady walks up to me at a party, first
| thing I'm doing is asking for references.
| genghisjahn wrote:
| My dude...
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| This must come up a lot.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| About as often as you'd expect.
| EricMausler wrote:
| This also applies to self defense. If someone has targeted
| you, the odds of you beating them in a fight is different
| than the odds you can take on a random person, or a random
| thief even
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| I would put the odds of Mark Xu's license having that name on
| it at about 15%. Because Mark is probably an anglicised asian
| name.
| Snow_Falls wrote:
| Not to mention that many Chinese immigrants will give their
| children European names.
| anamexis wrote:
| The OP covers this a bit as well:
|
| > 20 coin tosses (by me) all coming up Tails. YES
|
| > If _you_ tossed the coins then the first answer would be
| NO, unless I 'm very confident you lack the ability to fool
| me ...
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Why is the 20 multiplied by the million? Why not 0.95
| multiplied by million?
|
| Using the same argument I would accept infinite odds that my
| username is quickthrower2 so there is infinite information?
| Strilanc wrote:
| It's important to understand that when they said "bits" they
| didn't mean information in the Shannon entropy sense, but
| rather in the log-odds evidence sense.
|
| Gaining a Shannon entropy bit means learning the answer to a
| yes-no question that had 1:1 odds.
|
| Gaining a log-odds evidence bit means doubling your best-
| guess odds on a question you are uncertain about, from X:Y to
| (2X):Y.
|
| One Shannon bit is worth arbitrarily many evidence bits,
| because a Shannon bit takes you from 1:1 odds to
| UNBOUNDEDLYHUGE:1 odds. So... yeah, actually, reading your
| username _is_ worth infinite bits of log-odds evidence on
| what your username is! (Ignoring practical issues like the
| small chance of computer malfunctions, of course.)
|
| And to answer your initial question: the 20 just came from
| the assertion they'd bet 20:1. That was arbitrary.
| neilkk wrote:
| This isn't how the mathematics of odds works, as the GP
| correctly pointed out. An event which is 20:1 on is not 20
| times more likely than certainty.
|
| Going from 1:4 to 1:2 means that the event has become twice
| as likely. But going from 2:1 to 4:1 does not: it means
| that the complementary event has become half as likely.
|
| Based on this, we can't do math with odds treating them
| identically to ratios.
|
| If you do the math correctly, the two types of information
| measure are basically the same thing.
| Strilanc wrote:
| A log-odds of b bits means an odds of 2^b : 1 which means
| a probability of p = 2^b / (2^b + 1).
|
| In the original comment, the evidence update was stated
| as going from 20:1 to 1:1000000 and it was claimed this
| was approximately 24 bits of evidence. The update is from
| 2^4.3:1 to 2^-19.9:1. Subtracting the exponents you get
| 4.3 - -19.9 = 24.2 which is approximately 24 as claimed.
| The "20" in 20:1 is correctly accounted for by the ~4
| additional bits of evidence on top of updating from
| 1:1000000 to 1:1.
|
| Clearly evidence bits behave very differently from
| entropy bits. Acquiring a single entropy bit is an update
| from 1:1 to 0:1 which is 2^0:1 to 2^-infinity:1. It's
| worth an unbounded number of evidence bits. It's
| important not to mix these two things up.
| neilkk wrote:
| Yes, you are doing math with odds as though they are
| fractions or ratios, which is deeply incorrect. 20:1 is
| not the reciprocal of 1:20 but the complement. Odds
| ratios and similar calculations do not work like this.
| You can do this type of calculation using X:1 odds or 1:X
| odds but not both in the same calculation.
|
| Or perhaps you can provide a reference to a justification
| of this type of calculation?
| Strilanc wrote:
| Search "decibels" in
| https://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes for the
| explanation.
|
| I think you're just wrong about needing everything to be
| in the form X:1 or 1:X. When I compute the ratio of
| 1000000:1 divided by 1:20 it gives 1000000:(1/20) then
| scaling both sides by the same factor gives 20000000:1.
| neilkk wrote:
| Your reference definitely doesn't show a calculation of
| the type you are trying to do. Likelihood ratios are not
| the same as odds ratios; they do not have the problem I
| described.
|
| I would be very surprised if you can find any reference
| at all to the number you describe as 'evidence bits', or
| anything equivalent, made by anyone who can show an
| understanding of basic probability, statistics, or
| information theory.
|
| I understand how you get 20,000,000 as the answer to the
| calculation you carry out. My point is that that number
| is not meaningful in any way.
| pavlov wrote:
| This article seems to twist the definition of "extraordinary"
| to something clearly not intended by the original quote about
| claims and evidence.
|
| Mark is a very common first name. Xu is a Chinese surname
| shared by over ten million people (according to Wikipedia).
| It's entirely ordinary that someone would have this combination
| of names.
| TomK32 wrote:
| Don't ask me why, but I had to urge to look up the number of
| Chinese surnames: About 2000 are currently in use, half the
| Han Chinese population uses just 19 surnames. Quite low
| compared to the 850 THOUSAND (another source has more than a
| million) surnames used in Germany, twice as much as in Spain
| bespite it have a tradition of double-names. I guess Germany
| being such a central state with many migration waves over the
| last 600~800 years since family names have become common.
| walthamstow wrote:
| It's even more concentrated in Vietnam. A very large chunk
| of the country is called Nguyen. Korea has similar with
| Kim/Park/Lee.
| mathstuf wrote:
| _Someone_ , yes. The person in front of you? Unlikely.
|
| Analogy: _someone_ has a winning lottery ticket. Is it the
| one in your hand? Probably not.
| pavlov wrote:
| That's a good analogy for my point, because just having a
| lottery ticket isn't extraordinary even though all of the
| tickets are unique.
|
| If somebody claims they are holding a winning lottery
| ticket and will sell it to me for a 50% discount because
| they are leaving the country in two hours and don't have
| time to cash it out, that's an extraordinary claim and I
| would need extraordinary evidence to take the deal.
|
| If someone says their name is Mark Wu, it's like saying
| they are holding a non-winning lottery ticket with serial
| number 12345654321. It's at best a curiosity.
| jameshart wrote:
| 24 bits seems about right for the information content of six
| Latin characters arranged in a pronounceable English
| orthography (the 'X' has pretty high information value though).
| mattikl wrote:
| An interesting read. I was secretly hoping it would have delved
| more into the psychology of how we perceive that chance, what
| kind of biases we have. I feel we have a tendency of saying "it
| never fails" on probabilities which turn out to be much bigger
| than one in a million.
| JohnKemeny wrote:
| Well, a wave hit it.
|
| A wave hit it?
|
| A wave hit the ship.
|
| Is that unusual?
|
| Oh yeah, at sea? Chance in a million!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
| rjmunro wrote:
| > As I tell students, your grandmother is too sensible to be
| outdoors during a thunderstorm and a disproportional number of
| deaths are young men.
|
| reminds me of https://xkcd.com/795/
| defrost wrote:
| Your grandmother very probably doesn't work in a rail gang.
| ELEVEN members of a railway maintenance crew had to be taken to
| hospital on Saturday after lightning struck train tracks they
| were working on in WA's Goldfields-Esperance region.
|
| https://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/railway-maint...
| nurettin wrote:
| This is a solved problem, otherwise casinos would go bankrupt.
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| This is very cool, you have to try to pick a random sequence of
| 1s and 0s and then shows you how not random it is.
|
| https://calmcode.io/blog/inverse-turing-test.html
| tasuki wrote:
| I passed everything up to and including the three digit
| sequences on my first try. 10 fail, 110 pass. I guess I'm
| random enough?
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| Did you ever consider becoming a software library when you
| grow up?
|
| `from tasuki import random`
| pranavgoyal wrote:
| Rolling 100 dice and landing the same number
| stkdump wrote:
| More like 8 or 9 dice landing on the same number.
| AndroTux wrote:
| Yeah, no. Read the article. There's an example with a coin
| flip, which only has two possible values, and therefore a much,
| much higher possibility than a dice.
| andirk wrote:
| Existing is such an unlikely chance that it's more likely we
| don't.
| n_sd wrote:
| Found a fun CgpGrey video on 1 in a million experience.
| [here](https://youtu.be/PmWQmZXYd74?si=BDBkrfxEXgAgeRfw)
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| Is there a word for what he's doing with his voice in this
| video? Vsauce does the same thing. It's a strange cadence that
| would make me lift an eyebrow if someone was speaking to me
| like that in real life. It's like if captain Kirk removed
| emotion from his voice and began to lecture you.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| The Linguistics of 'YouTube Voice'
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10693664
|
| From 2015, so the style might have changed
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10695754
| blt wrote:
| Wendover Productions is another major offender.
| putzdown wrote:
| From the article: "24 million babies will someday be President."
| This seems an improbable claim. Is he saying something sensible
| by virtue of the surrounding analysis that I'm just not
| following?
| lindenr wrote:
| Yeah, I think it's a typo and should have been "one in every 24
| million babies" - this makes sense given the numbers, with 4
| million born every year but only a new president every 6 years.
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| The parsing is ambiguous, read it with parentheses as follows:
| 1 in (6 times 4.0 million = 24 million) babies will someday be
| President
| MobileVet wrote:
| I absolutely love the "Becker Bottle". It gives you the ability
| to truly visualize this concept. Super fun to play with and a
| great learning aid for chemistry classes.
|
| https://www.flinnsci.com/becker-bottle-one-in-a-million/ap45...
| walthamstow wrote:
| Wonderful concept. Thanks for bringing to my attention
| Rygian wrote:
| From a sibling submission in front page:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort
|
| "Micromort" is a unit of risk defined as a one-in-a-million
| chance of death, [...] used to measure the riskiness of various
| day-to-day activities.
| dtgriscom wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_(unit)
| geocrasher wrote:
| Lloyd Christmas and Mary Swanson.
| dstroot wrote:
| Reminds me of "one in a million is next Tuesday":
|
| https://jeffgarretson.blog/2014/07/17/one-in-a-million-is-ne...
|
| Worth a read if you are an SRE.
| eep_social wrote:
| I like the formulation, "at 100 rps one in a million is 8.6
| times each day."
| ferociouskite56 wrote:
| On government insurance you have 1 in a million+ chance to be
| assigned an unbiased, compassionate to pain, not anti-engineer
| psychiatrist.
| erostrate wrote:
| The following are all ~ 1 in a million chance of death, or 1
| micromort:
|
| Travelling 6 miles (9.7 km) by motorcycle
|
| Travelling 17 miles (27 km) by walking
|
| Travelling 20 miles (32 km) by bicycle
|
| Travelling 230 miles (370 km) by car
|
| Travelling 1,000 miles (1,600 km) by jet
|
| Travelling 6,000 miles (9,656 km) by train
|
| But switching from car to bicycle for short trips still increases
| life expectancy due to health effects.
|
| Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2920084/
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| As a cyclist that's trying to not die, I also have to assume
| this heavily depends on where you're cycling. Along a stroad?
| You're dead. Country road with more bikes than cars? Much
| safer.
| hughesjj wrote:
| Also you can rack up miles on the interstate like no one's
| business on a road trip etc. imo it should be by unit time
| not unit distance but I could see the argument for distance
|
| Same with planes. Like yeah if you wanted to make the same
| trip without a plane it's way more dangerous but what if you
| just wouldn't take the train from coast to coast in the first
| place?
|
| IDK, imo time is the most important tradeoff for transport
| when doing per capital/etc measurements
| drzaiusapelord wrote:
| Chicago to LA is about 2,000 miles.
|
| So in the article about 200 miles driving (in California) is 1
| in a million chance of dying. So lets use that number
| nationwide to be lazy.
|
| Now we can move a decimal point over. So the death chances of a
| Chicago to LA drive is 100,000 in one. But you drive back, so
| then its that twice. Once in 50,000 people dying on a Chicago
| to LA and back roadtrip is extremely frightening. How many
| people from the midwest make this drive a year? Or from the
| east coast? How many don't make it back?
|
| The USA, on average, has 100+ fatalities via auto
| transportation a day.
|
| The above ignores serious injury, permanent disability, etc.
| Its just death. The chances of having to deal with a broken
| spine, losing a limb, blindness, 3rd degree burns all over your
| body, etc aren't even calculated, but those are real and far
| more common than death. Death being harder to achieve with
| modern medical treatments.
|
| Cars are extremely dangerous. We downplay what it means to
| drive.
| tyingq wrote:
| > We downplay what it means to drive
|
| I wondered about that reading some of the comments about the
| 737 Max. We routinely travel in exponentially more risky ways
| all the time, yet we expend time thinking about the safety
| benefit of avoiding a specific type of aircraft.
|
| Not downplaying airline safety as a whole there, but thinking
| about it for yourself on a personal level is maybe not moving
| the needle.
| physicles wrote:
| Agreed. It must've been terrible for the people on that
| plane, but I don't think it's worth my time to worry about
| what plane I'm flying on, or what the maintenance record of
| the airline is. For developed countries, they're super good
| enough.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I wonder if it would be worth it to express unlikely events like
| this in powers of Dunbar's number? Round it down to 100 to make
| the math easier, and also because there's a lot of overlap in
| social networks. One million is 100^3, so in your acquaintances-
| of-acquaintances-of-acquaintances network there's an expected
| value of one person who has to deal with this one in a million
| problem, I think, right?
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Only if there is no overlap whatsoever in who is an
| acquaintance versus who is an acquaintance of an acquaintance.
| That is extremely unlikely. I'm sure there exists some data out
| there on how quickly an average social graph grows as a
| function of degrees of separation that can be used, however.
| djkivi wrote:
| Cosmo Kramer : Have you ever met a proctologist? Well, they
| usually have a very good sense of humor. You meet a proctologist
| at a party, don't walk away. Plant yourself there, because you
| will hear the funniest stories you've ever heard. See, no one
| wants to admit to them that they stuck something up there. Never!
| It's always an accident. Every proctologist story ends in the
| same way: "It was a million to one shot, Doc. Million to one!"
|
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0697702/characters/nm0000632
| OnlyMortal wrote:
| Martians coming to Earth and, specifically, to the Woking area
| near London.
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| since we're having a bit of fun:
|
| Mary: "I'd say.. more like one out of a million." Lloyd: (slowly
| reacts) "So you're telling me there's a chance? ... yeah!!"
|
| Dumb and Dumber (1994)
| 3737hdhd7372 wrote:
| Reminds me of working on a service with a huge amount of traffic
|
| What I found interesting was how often edge cases would occur
| with that much traffic
|
| Something that would be really difficult to reproduce locally
| would happen like 100 times a week if you looked at the logs
| oatmeal1 wrote:
| It's all availability heuristic. If you can think of an example,
| you think it's more likely.
|
| "Hundreds of children die every year in drowning accidents," he
| says. "We need lifeguards at pools more than armed guards at
| schools."
|
| https://www.city-journal.org/article/sorrow-and-precaution-n...
|
| https://news.gallup.com/poll/266681/nearly-half-fear-victim-...
| yboris wrote:
| My favorite mental visualization I came up with: imagine driving
| from New Jersey to Florida (substitute with a long drive you
| had). Mine was about 1,200 miles which at 60 miles per hour is 20
| hours. That's 72,000 seconds of mind-numbing driving.
|
| Now if during the entire, exhausting, 20 hours of driving, you
| press a button, and it falls within the "danger zone" that lasts
| 15 seconds, you lose.
|
| The above example is better when looking at lottery winning
| chances (worse than 1 in million) - where you can imagine having
| to throw a quarter out of the window, hoping for it to land
| within the proper 1 inch section of the road.
|
| I like this example because it gives you visceral feeling -
| allowing you to think in terms of lengths of road or length of
| time to compare various odds.
| DeRock wrote:
| 15 seconds danger zone / 72,000 seconds of driving = 1 in 4,800
|
| Any reason you chose those numbers? Trying to understand the
| significance of those odds.
| slap_shot wrote:
| Also curious! But even that does help to appreciate what a
| 1:4800 chance something is. I really like that frame of
| reference.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > imagine having to throw a quarter out of the window, hoping
| for it to land within the proper 1 inch section of the road
|
| This idea also helps to illustrate something which is intuitive
| to me but seemingly hard to explain. Sometimes when an event
| occurs people will exclaim, "Wow, what are the odds of that?!"
| and then if it turns out to be a seemingly unlikely event, then
| it becomes "wow, it's crazy that happened!".
|
| But it's really not. Using the pull-quote as an example, it's
| the difference between 1) throwing the quarter out the window
| and drawing a circle around where it lands and 2) drawing a
| circle on the ground, hoping to land the quarter in it when
| it's thrown. Of course the exact result in the first case was
| unlikely but nobody predicted it so it's uninteresting.
| IshKebab wrote:
| It's because they think "that" is "meeting Dave from my
| previous job on holiday in Turin!" but it's actually "meeting
| one of the hundreds of acquaintances you've picked up over
| your life at any point when you're away from home at any
| time".
| rcar1046 wrote:
| Anything with a 50/50 accomplished 20 times in a row is right
| around 1,000,000 : 1.
| Delk wrote:
| The last one -- a young man's 1 in 1000 lifetime chance of
| getting breast cancer -- is actually quite curious: it's not
| _that_ much lower than his chance of getting testicular cancer,
| which apparently has an approximately 1 in 250 lifetime chance (I
| assume in the US). [1]
|
| And apparently a man is about equally likely to die from breast
| cancer as he is from testicular cancer: both have a lifetime
| chance of about 1 in 5000.
|
| [1] https://www.cancer.org/cancer/types/testicular-
| cancer/about/...
| WhitneyLand wrote:
| One of my favorite GPT-4 mistakes mentioned
|
| _Struck by a Meteorite: The odds of a person being struck by a
| meteorite are estimated to be about one in 1.6 million._
|
| I wonder how plausible things like this seem to people...
| fsckboy wrote:
| i immediately thought of the 2^20th examples. I often marvel at
| the 2^10th is 1000ish coincidence
|
| but people say things like "1 in a million" because it sounds
| _incalculably_ rare, so I 'm not sure I understand the goal here?
| to make an exaggeration sit on an intuitive scale as if it was
| meant literally? if successful that will make being "literally
| one in a million" fall out of favor just as literally has.
|
| one thing I took away from modestly extensive study of
| linguistics was, people need to stop thinking that words have
| strict definitions, and realize that words adopt definitions to
| suit what people are trying to say. What did they mean is more
| important than what did they say.
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