The Improbability Principle (Or things that have a one in 64 million chance happen... ALL the TIME!)

[HuckleB]

http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/the-improbability-principle/#more-9157

"...

But don’t worry, this just means you have to think a little harder about how likely things are. David Hand writes about this in his 2014 book: The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day. This is making the rounds again in the media because of the recent “rare” astronomical events.

Yesterday the Summer Solstice coincided with the Strawberry Moon – the first full moon in June. The last time this happened was in 1967. Recently we have seen “rare” transits of Mercury and Venus across the sun.

These events are not that rare, and I really don’t see what the fuss is all about (I guess the media is desperate for anything they can hype.) Don’t get me wrong, I love astronomical events, it is their rarity that I think is overhyped.

...

First it is important to recognize that when you have lots of opportunities for unlikely things to happen, they are bound to happen by chance. As I like to say, in New York City, which has a population of over 8 million people, a 1 in 8 million coincidence should happen every day.

..."


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A good read by Dr. Novella. Of course, Tim Minchin cuts to the chase:

"A woman had given birth to naturally conceived identical quadruplet girls, which is very rare. And she said, "The doctors told me there was a one in 64 million chance that this could happen. It's A MIRACLE!" But, of course, we know it's not, because things that have a one in 64 million chance happen ... ALL the TIME! To presume that your one in 64 million chance thing is a miracle, is to significantly underestimate the total number of things that THERE ARE. ... Maths."

-Tim Minchin

[arcane1]

1. Sounds like a fascinating book, thanks!

[whatthehey]

2. Oh yeah I keep running into this

I was once, decades ago but likely to reoccur now, talking to a RWNJ in a busy sports bar about how unlikely it was for the Clintons to make a bunch of money on the futures market by chance and so it had to be evidence of fraud.

I invited him to consider the 200 or so people in the joint, consider how many other options they had for passing the time, how many other people could possibly have chosen to visit that bar at that time but had not, and estimate the a priori probability of those people, and only those people, being in that suburban bar at that particular time. Because this anecdote is not a bouncy ball story, I'm not going to pretend he saw the light (he pretended the difference was human will or something, as if it's not human will making futures trades) but we sure did run out of zeros awfully quickly.

Same deal with the mouthreathers who still think Hoyle's jumbo jet junkyard is a telling rebuttal of abiogenesis. Few really "get" probability.

[HuckleB]

3. Indeed. I need a good sociology book re: Japan!

I love your abbreviation: RWNJ! Awesome!

[Orrex]

4. Richard Dawkins explored this nicely in The Blind Watchmaker

He drew a clear and important distinction between something that is "unimaginable" versus something that is "incalculable." In practical terms, most mundane humans can't imagine the unlikelihood of natural quadruplets (especially not those who insist that they can!), but we can readily calculate that unlikelihood.

I was once involved in a near-miss accident on icy roads, with my car spinning about 540° through oncoming traffic. We survived unhurt and with only a tiny ding in our bumper. Friends later told us that the odds against such a thing were "astronomical." I can't crunch the math, but I'd have to guess that our odds were probably something closer to one-in-fifty, but that didn't stop armchair statisticians from citing it as "miraculous" proof of God's grace.


As a species, and absent formal study of statistics, we seem to have a pretty weak overall sense of probability.


k/r

[HuckleB]

5. Nice, and great example, too!