What are the Chances ... ?

[WindomURL]

That's CRAZY!
(I'm Brian Fellow)

[Phanuthier]

What are the chances Jordan Leopold meets another Jordan?

[photon]

Our brains don't like coincidences, so we try to attribute special meanings to them, and marvel at how unlikely they are.

Our minds aren't programmed to intuitively understand probabilities, we forget that for every unlikely event, millions of parallel "trials" happen all the time since our populations are so big.

An example: go back to that school. Say each class has 23 people in it, and there's 20 classrooms in it. How many classrooms would you expect there to be people who share the exact same birthday? Or to put it another way, in a room of 23 people what are the chances that two people will share the exact same birthday?

[cSpooge]

50/50 if I remember my stats class right :P

[photon]

Yup, I remember a math teacher did that to us, bet us something that there were two people in the room that had the same birthday.. intuitively it seems like a bad bet but if you work out the numbers it isn't.

You can use this to take advantage of people too.

I'm a great market predictor. I send out 32,000 newsletters predicting the direction the TSE will take over the next week. Half I send out say up, half say down. Next week I send out 16,000 to the ones that I got right. Next week send out another 8,000. After six weeks I'll have 500 people falling over themselves to give me their money because I could predict the stock market for 6 weeks in a row.

[IgnitedSoul]

Originally Posted by photon

Yup, I remember a math teacher did that to us, bet us something that there were two people in the room that had the same birthday.. intuitively it seems like a bad bet but if you work out the numbers it isn't.

Once in grade 8, I was in Lions Quest, which is basically like health class, and there were probably 15 to 20 kids in there. So as if I remember why, but we were supposed to group ourselves with people born in the same month as us. There were only 2 other January babies, and so out of curiosity I asked what day. All 3 of us were the 10th.

I'd say that's preeeetty unlikely, but who knows.

[ricoFlame]

as a teacher myself, that is unreal. talk about a grade 8's worst nightmare come true. unreal.

[Phanuthier]

Just a bumparoo on this thread, I was just swithing phone numbers with the group I'm going on a multi-day climbing trip with this long weekend, one of hte guys has the same last 4 digits phone number as mine and first digit.

(xxx) 4xx 2734

(x's are different numbers)