this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
82 points (81.1% liked)
Technology
59414 readers
3115 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If something has a 1 in 100M chance of happening to someone, you’d expect that about 80 people in the world now have had that thing happen to them.
Don't mistake statistics for reality. Statistics describe reality, they don't dictate it.
In this situation, there could be a 1:100M chance for any random investor to be this successful. Or there could be a 1:3 chance but you need to meet specific criteria, which he and only a few others have.
You can't describe a situation with dice rolls unless you're very sure what kind of dice you're rolling.
I was responding to purely hypothetical odds that someone just made up, in which case things can be as complicated or simple as one wants them to be.
But even if I were making an actual prediction based on real statistical data, I am not sure why you would think that having an expectation of the approximate distribution of something given what we know about its statistical likelihood is “mistaking statistics for actual reality”.