3 ms·

My favorite are the conspiracy theories as to why the outages are seemingly so close together in this Summer of 2019. All kinds of imaginative reasons abound.

• moate 7y ago
  My best guess is that "sequencing creates narratives." It's like in baseball, how a player who hits .333 over the season will have 0-10 and 10-10 stretches where he either can't hit everything or demolishes every pitch he sees. You'll often see sports news come up with stories for why this is happening, and most of the time it's just "this is how statistics work". TL;dr- complex systems are complex, and trying to understand them isn't usually possible for outside parties.
  • Dumblydorr 7y ago
    Not entirely true regarding sports, 538 has done some decent analyses of basketball shooting and found that hot and cold shooting is often true, the same is likely true for baseball. Streaks are naturally occurring, both for randomness and due to other, harder to explain factors.