Comments on: What are the chances?

By: nina

nina — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:55:16 +0000

That’s way too much math. My brain hurts.

I need a beer too.

By: laocoon

laocoon — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 01:14:46 +0000

My logins never work the second time around on blog sites, so I’ve given up. BTW, I’m watching CNN declare Barack as the winner in VA. A pity I have to go to bed now and there is a 6 hours time difference. My reaction to John’s post to your last entry: As I never get tired of telling my astounded European friends (to be precise: only the ones who haven’t been to the US): Take ANY American, and even if s/he (particularly he, though) sleeps under a bridge and has been homeless for 5 years or hardly knows that the world is not flat: Just about anybody anywhere will always be able to and WANT TO work out a rate of return or a profit margin. Even kids seem to be born with that ability and interest. I’ve listened to John (no, he ain’t homeless and he sleeps in a comfy bed and I’ve even heard him mention once that the world is not flat open-mouthed several times when it comes to these matters. Over here, normally merely the pros can or rather bother to work it out. Only the Brits are more like Americans. The rest of us have hardly ever given it a thought ever since we’ve passed these exams in maths at school millions of years ago. Vive la différence! Brigitte

By: John X

John X — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 06:00:24 +0000

I’m no probability analyst, but I think the guy’s math is a bit fucked up.

To wit:

“On the sunnier side of the availability heuristic is the lottery. Should you invest £2 a day or use it to buy lottery tickets?

Maths makes the decision obvious. Suppose you invest two quid every day at the reasonable rate of 10%. It will take you almost exactly 50 years to accumulate £1m. To earn this same £1m in the National Lottery, you would (on average) have to match five numbers and a bonus ball, at odds of 2,330,635-to-1.

If you spent two quid a day for 50 years you would total just over 36,500 tickets and would thus have only a 1-in-63 chance of making that million pounds. However, the available image of immediate wealth subverts this rationality.”

Not by my 6th grade math. Yes, if you bought 36,500 tickets ALL AT ONCE for an upcoming lottery drawing, and all the numbers were different, then maybe your odds would improve from 2,330,635-to-1 to 1-in-63.

But if you buy two tickets a day, spending 2 quid total, every day your odds are 1,165,317.5-to-1….EVERY DAY. The lottery or the universe or “God” or whatever doesn’t “remember” how many times you’ve already played, and improve your odds a bit each day until, after fifty years, you’ve bettered the odds to 1-in-63, any more than a coin “remembers” how many times you’ve flipped it and come up tails instead of heads.

With each new toss of the coin (assuming an unrigged coin) your odds are 50-50.

One might say it’s POSSIBLE to win the lottery (and people do, but damned few compared to how many play) but IMPROBABLE to the point that it’s essentially impossible.

Now I want a glass of expensive beer. You, Blogblah, must buy.