3 ms·
This reminds me of a discussion on a mailing list where someone pointed out the most amazing scam. You find 256 people and email them the details of a 50/50 pr
by iuguy 16y ago
This reminds me of a discussion on a mailing list where someone pointed out the most amazing scam.
You find 256 people and email them the details of a 50/50 prediction. 128 people should get the right prediction. You then email them another 50/50 prediction. Of course, 64 of them receive the right prediction twice in a row. You then make a third 50/50 prediction to the 64, another to the 32 positive responses and so on until you find a manageable number of people who now believe you have some amazing insight into the future.
As much as we may want to think things are not random, sometimes they really are, sometimes they're just probabilities.
- frossie 16y agoExploitations of people's failure to understand statistics are a lot older than email. Even in my grandmother's time there would be somebody who would offer to predict the gender of your unborn child - "if I am wrong, I'll give you your money back!".
- lotusleaf1987 16y agoThat scam is an old one going back at the least to newspapers in the early 1900s. Specifically, sports prediction services did it in classified ads (and continue to do so in some places). I think most con-artist scams haven't really changed, just adopted new mediums and new technologies.
- Xk 16y agoReminds me of http://xkcd.com/628/ http://xkcd.com/628/
- ngsayjoe 16y agoWarren buffet says what if all that predict successfully come from the same village, wouldnt that tells you something?
- khafra 16y agoThe same rules of probability apply, so it depends on the number of villages making predictions divided by the improbability of successfully matching that village's predictions. If there were only 10 or 20 people buying lottery tickets, and one of them actually won, I'd pay very close attention to that one person's methods.