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Is 17 the most "random" number?
- philh 16y agoThis is a really bad analysis. I'd be willing to guess the author doesn't know much about statistics. (Or more charitably, he's just trying too hard to write for people who don't understand statistics.) That said, it does look like the sample was large enough for the results to be valid, at least for "17".
- DougBTX 16y agoWhat's so bad about it? I thought that generating 347 random numbers was a neat way to demonstrate the variation in a random distribution with the same sample size actually polled.
- teaspoon 16y agoThat doesn't really tell us anything about variance. After all, in that single trial of generating 347 numbers, his computer could just as easily have spat out a uniform distribution.* To see variance, it would have been better to generate 347 numbers many times over, then plot the standard deviation of the count of each number using error bars. *You can't actually evenly distribute 347 trials over the range [1,20], but you see my point.
- ugh 16y agoThat wouldn’t be as intuitive. We have better statistical tools, sure, but his graph was immediately understandable, even if you don’t know what standard deviation is or what error bars are. I would use that graph as an illustration for the uninitiated even if I had exhausted the statistical toolset. (Also, there are better tools but it’s not as though what he did was meaningless and provided no evidence for the point he was making. It’s not as strong but it is there.)
- ez77 16y agoAnd of course, there is the small probability that his computer could have picked the number 10 as many as 347 times in a row. Something tells me he would have run the computer simulation again in that case.
- DougBTX 16y agohis computer could just as easily have spat out a uniform distribution But that's the point, isn't it? An exactly even distribution is unlikely. So unlikely, that the first distribution he found was probably fine for use in the article. I suppose my only real point here is that error bars are boring, and it's perfectly possible to understand what the variation in a typical random set is by looking at the set, without having to explicitly put error bars around a straight line.
- jerf 16y agoComment 10 from the original poster: "My stats knowledge is baby-simple. I first use an unpaired t-test, and if that doesn't give good results, I move on to a paired test (p<.05). That's pretty close to the limit for me."
- dkokelley 16y agoI wouldn't say it's bad. He doesn't go in to proving how the differences are statistically more significant, but that doesn't mean they aren't.
- chadboyda 16y agoI'm sure this has a lot more to do with "anchoring" than "random".
- yena 16y agoThat's what my old math professor always said: "Now let's pick a random number, say 17, and ..."
- detcader 16y agoMy economics teacher once used the number 17 as a random number twice in one class, without noticing. A note on the number 7: magicians actually use the frequency of that number being picked for their tricks. If an amateur card magician asks you to pick a number, for example, "between 5 and 10" or the more daring "between 1 and 10" they want you to say 7. Now that you know this, though, I'd rather you humor us if you're ever asked..
- msbarnett 16y agoint get_random() { return 17; // The most random number }
- antonios 16y agoAlthough the computer-generated charts are statistically meaningless, the persistence of number '17' in humans likely has its reason. The first thing that comes to my mind is that this happens because 17 the number from 1 to 20 that we come into most rarely. When we learn multiplication at school, it doesn't have any factors so we tend to skip it, and for the same reason it's rare to encounter it in various problems. This happens also to '7', but '7' is small enough to occur in many occasions such as counting a number of items etc. So, maybe we are more inclined to pick '17' as 'random' because we rarely meet it. Maybe.
- spicyj 16y agoThe same could be said for other primes like 13 and 19, though.
- baddox 16y ago13 has pervasive cultural significance, but I agree that 19 seems as "rare" as 17. Perhaps at a glance 19 is less obviously prime than 17. Also note that 17 and 19 are both ages at which nothing really notable happens. 16 is driving age for lots of states and 18 is a big "legal" milestone.
- jarek 16y ago19 is drinking age in most of Canada. 19 feels too close to the nice, round, important 20 to count as properly random for me.
- electromagnetic 16y agoAgreed 17 really doesn't seem to have any significance anywhere in almost any society.
- pigbucket 16y agoI learned the truth at seventeen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Seventeen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Seventeen)
- dennisgorelik 16y agoHow can that knowledge (that people like 17 as a random number) be turned into profit?
- hugh3 16y agoEasy. Make bets with strangers that you can guess the number they're thinking of.
- archgoon 16y agoYou'll lose more than half the time. If you try a more complicated betting structure than "Bet you $5", you'll have to explain it to them, which will make them suspicious.
- arantius 16y agoLet's assume the data in the article is perfectly representative, or that it is chosen "almost 18" percent of the time. I'll say an even 18 to make this easier: "I'll bet that if you pick any random number from 1 to 20, I can guess it. If I miss, I give you a dollar. If I get it right, you give me ten." Over 100 trials, you would lose $1 92 times, but gain $10 18 times: net gain of $88. It works almost all the way down to getting $5 per correct guess. Intuition would tell the guesser that they've got a nineteen-to-one chance of gaining a dollar. You know (in theory) they've got only slightly better than a one-in-five chance of winning.
- chunkbot 16y agoThere were 17 comments when I wrote this one. Pretty random!
- paraschopra 16y ago23 is. Though I am pretty rational person, I can't seem to explain why I see 23 all around. (Guessing it is some sort of psychological bias -- but the evidence from my everyday experience just baffles me). See this: 23 enigma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_enigma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_enigma
- mcantelon 16y agoI've been aware of the 23 enigma theory for ~5 years, but haven't noticed evidence supporting it.