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You're apparently the one who doesn't understand how statistics/probability works. You're correct about his chance of dying once, but there's also a chance of d

You're apparently the one who doesn't understand how statistics/probability works. You're correct about his chance of dying once, but there's also a chance of dying twice, a chance of dying 3 times, etc. The expected value of the number of times he would die is 5000(1/1000), or 5. If you replaced "deaths" in your post with "coin flips", this becomes obvious. I'll repeat your post with some different numbers so you can see how absurd your argument is. If you have a 1/2 chance of flipping heads and you flip 10 coins, you won't get 5 heads. You will have 1-(1/2)^10 of flipping heads, that [sic] 99.902%. That's not 1. So you won't get 5 heads. See how that doesn't make sense? Now, obviously a real person can't die more than once, but if you think he was mistaken about that then his supposed error has more to do with biology than statistics. Any reasonable reader would understand that it was just his rhetorical way of describing a large number of independent statistical events. If it helps, think of it as a population of 5000 equally-careless people taking 1 shower each, not a single person taking 5000.

shin_lao 14y ago
Sorry, I understand what you're trying to say, but I don't think your example serves your point. I don't think I mixed up expected value and probability of occurrence, if I did please point out where. You don't care too much about expected value because once the event occurs (death), you can't play anymore... If you were playing money, on the other hand, expected value would be much more interesting. I think probability is interesting because if you say "I'll take the shower 2,500 times instead of 5,000" you drop the probability of death to 91.8 % (from 99.9%)... If you say I'll die on average only 2.5 times you say nothing interesting.
- RobAtticus 14y ago
  He actually says "I’d die or become crippled about five times before reaching my life expectancy." Being crippled does not necessarily preclude you from taking a shower. Therefore, if you look at his expected value of "having a significant fall in the shower" instead of "dying in the shower", it doesn't have the same problem of being impossible. Obviously all 5 can't be fatal events.

shin_lao 14y ago

Sorry, I understand what you're trying to say, but I don't think your example serves your point. I don't think I mixed up expected value and probability of occurrence, if I did please point out where. You don't care too much about expected value because once the event occurs (death), you can't play anymore... If you were playing money, on the other hand, expected value would be much more interesting. I think probability is interesting because if you say "I'll take the shower 2,500 times instead of 5,000" you drop the probability of death to 91.8 % (from 99.9%)... If you say I'll die on average only 2.5 times you say nothing interesting.

RobAtticus 14y ago
He actually says "I’d die or become crippled about five times before reaching my life expectancy." Being crippled does not necessarily preclude you from taking a shower. Therefore, if you look at his expected value of "having a significant fall in the shower" instead of "dying in the shower", it doesn't have the same problem of being impossible. Obviously all 5 can't be fatal events.