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> They sum it up nicely but it's too easy to miss: > "The probability that a fair election would produce [these number distribution disparities] is less than .
by WilliamLP 17y ago
> They sum it up nicely but it's too easy to miss:
> "The probability that a fair election would produce [these number distribution disparities] is less than .005. In other words, a bet that the numbers are clean is a one in two-hundred long shot."
Man, reading that makes me roll my eyes and wonder how the average person reading this site has such poor statistical intuition as to mod this up.
It's like rolling a die six times, and arguing that getting the exact numbers I got has an exceptionally low chance of occurring, so the die must be rigged.
- lutorm 17y agoTaleb makes an interesting argument regarding this in The Black Swan: If you flip a coin five times and you get five heads, what is the probability that the next flip is a head? You have two options: either you trust your (unproven) assumption that the coin is fair and that you just witnessed a very unlikely event and say "the past outcomes do not affect the probability of the next throw, it's 0.5." The other option, on the other hand, is to conclude that your assumption that the coin is fair is false, at which point you estimate the next throw based on the previous sequence and say "1.0". None of these are right or wrong, it just depends on what prior you trust.