4 ms·
One example of this is people saying "you have a 1 in 10 million chance of getting attacked by a shark!" I thought about this swimming for an hour+ a day at a b
by themgt 3y ago
One example of this is people saying "you have a 1 in 10 million chance of getting attacked by a shark!" I thought about this swimming for an hour+ a day at a beach with a huge amount of sharks.
Like "1 in 10 million? What's the average number of hours per year per American spent full body swimming in shark infested waters? Not even a very high % of people who live in this area spend as much time doing that as I do. If I spend 500 hours per year doing that, my risk calculation has gotta be about 50,000 times worse than average."
- NotYourLawyer 3y agohttps://xkcd.com/795/ https://xkcd.com/795/
- joe_the_user 3y agoBut even more, some number of shark bites occur each year and for the people bitten, the probability of having been bitten is 1. The main thing is that sure, "the probability of this highly incriminating series of events happening to you without you being guilty" may be very small. But probability of "A series of highly incriminating and unlikely series of events happening somewhere, to someone" may be very high, nearly one.
- hoseja 3y ago>for the people bitten, the probability of having been bitten is 1 That's completely contrary to the usual use of probability. The probability of having been bitten for everyone else is then 0 and the concept becomes meaningless.