What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)

https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/Real-World/million.html

by ksec • 3 years ago

269 186 3 years ago

stat.berkeley.edu

DeathArrow2• 3 years ago

Picking a random integer between 1 and 1 million.

onion2k• 3 years ago

That depends on the quality of your randomness. If it's a person picking the number that definitely isn't a 1 in a million chance for most numbers. You need to get pretty specialized hardware before you can confidently say it's definitely an equal chance for every number every time.

kortilla2• 3 years ago

No, you don’t need specialized hardware. The output of a modern hash for crypto absolutely needs to produce a uniform distribution across a million.

misja111• 3 years ago

It still is a 1 in a million chance if you have no a priori knowledge about the way the random numbers are distributed.

coldtea3• 3 years ago

If it's a person picking the number that definitely isn't a 1 in a million chance for most numbers.

Only if the person isn't aware of the issues involved.

ackbar03• 3 years ago

How bout this guy

https://images.app.goo.gl/aqh2AP5tj7JBkVKZ9

HL33tibCe7• 3 years ago

I think true randomness was implied in GP’s comment. A person picking a number “randomly” from a million is not random in the mathematical sense.

whartung• 3 years ago

It would be interesting what kind of clustering (if any) there would be if 1 million people were asked to pick a number between 1 and a million.

willcipriano• 3 years ago

Nope, picking a random integer between zero and one million and one would be though.

CodingThunder3• 3 years ago

I am seeing this same/similar comment on this thread which has been posted by three quite new accounts. Is this quite normal on HN now or is it some bots farming engagement? Btw, I'm a new member here, knew about HN since a long time but never bothered to make an account up until now

dtgriscom3• 3 years ago

Looks like one old-ish account with a number of submissions and comments, and two very-similarly-named copycats that are getting voted down to oblivion. Not very common here, but it happens.

DeathArrow2• 3 years ago

Is this quite normal on HN now or is it some bots farming engagement?

As you can see, my account is not new. I thought the comment will be funny. Not every comment should be terribly ingenious, long thought and crafted to show people how smart the commenter is. As a commenter you have the right to be spontaneous.

sebastiennight• 3 years ago

This is the right answer. I estimate no more than 1 human in a million can choose such a number at random.

Therefore if a human picks a number between 1 and 1 million, there's only a 1 in a million chance that the number was picked randomly.

oyekanonline• 3 years ago

Picking an integer between 1 and 1000000 without replacement.

hollowpython• 3 years ago

Winning rock-paper-scissors enough times against cgpgray: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PmWQmZXYd74

trojan13• 3 years ago

Being Dealt a Royal Flush in Poker. NO but pretty close.

Being Born on February 29th. NO

appstorelottery• 3 years ago

Royal flush in poker is more like 1 in 6493. ;-)

OJFord• 3 years ago

How did you get there? GP is talking about being dealt it, I think you've calculated the chance of it occurring in a round or something?

Wikipedia has GP's at 649739, so yeah 'almost' a million, roughly speaking. 4 / ((52 nCr 5) - (4 nCr 1)). (Four suits, one way to do it in each suit, deck of 52, five card hand.)

coldtea3• 3 years ago

A lottery with 1 million tickets?

Winning ~3-4 times at the roulette when betting on numbers?

Scarblac• 3 years ago

"Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one. But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten."

-- Terry Pratchett

Making fun of the fact that if someone says "it's a million-to-one chance, but it might just work!" in fiction, you know it's going to work.

In _Guards! Guards!_ this is taken to the point that they reckon that it's not enough to hit the dragon with the arrow at the soft spot, they also have to try a whole bunch of improbable circumstances to get the chance to exactly 1 in a million. Because exactly 1 in a million is hard to achieve, as the article shows.

eesmith• 3 years ago

thriftwy• 3 years ago

I was thinking of loading the dice in some CRPG so thar if some event has exactly 1/1,000,000 chance then resolve it as if it was 9/10.

Tade0• 3 years ago

They had a point there, even if not realising it, as that world's rules conform not to regular physics but the general population's beliefs.

TomK322• 3 years ago

The cheese-loving aviators have the Swiss-cheese-model to visualize how small unimportant errors can stack up to a catastrophic outcome. Though in my opinion there's a flaw in this thinking as no sane cheese seller would shuffle their layers of cheese after cutting them: Hence 1-in-million chances happen all the time. https://www.aviationfile.com/swiss-cheese-model/

cduzz2• 3 years ago

You'd think that but the Toledo fondue flood of 1973 says otherwise.

I can't find the wiki link, but Ronald O'Sullivan, who'd just taken over his father's cheese shop, was attempting to make a single block of swiss after a long week of selling the first 80% of several blocks to different restaurants. He took those cheese tails and stacked them up, not realizing the dangers he was putting everyone else in. It was later found that there were several other contributing factors; he hadn't used a properly certified cheese cutting blade (baloney!) and had reused the wax liner to store the off-cuts prior to reassembling the cheese that ultimately failed.

Some say you can still smell the swiss on hot august days.

blantonl• 3 years ago

I am a pilot, and in aviation related topics pilots tend to be almost ridiculously pedantic about stuff.

I want to congratulate you on writing the most pedantic thing I've ever read in my life. Truly a masterpiece. I can't wait to bust this out in my next aviation related discussion.

jameshart2• 3 years ago

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen it investigated as a mathematical puzzle but there’s probably some interesting number stuff to be found in investigating the mathematics of an idealized swiss cheese risk model.

If you take a series of unit squares and from each one remove a random circle (ah, the origin of every protracted probability argument among mathematicians: a random circle selected from which distribution?), then stack them up… after n squares, what is the expected hole size? Or how many squares do you need to stack to reduce the hole size to below a particular threshold?

Circle intersection geometry is hard though. Probably easier to start with axis aligned square holes, which are what you get when you make your Swiss cheese out of milk from spherical cows.

blt2• 3 years ago

I'm glad I'm not the only one bothered by the implied slice shuffling in this "model". Lol! We need to think of another real world setting where a stack of randomly hole-filled sheets would be naturally shuffled.

dstick• 3 years ago

GNU Terry!

trgn• 3 years ago

I reread Eric this weekend, somewhat on a whim. Real pleasure. I also had totally forgotten he came up with the premise of the Good Place. He had such so many ideas.

jampekka• 3 years ago

TFA: "If you tossed the coins [20 tails in a row] then the first answer would be NO, unless I'm very confident you lack the ability to fool me … "

cjohnson318• 3 years ago

Yeah, what does this even mean? Isn't coin flipping a random process?

inasio• 3 years ago

Million-to-one chances are a running theme in a few of his books, but aiming specifically for it as in Guards, Guards! is one of the better awesome things in the Discworld

dTal• 3 years ago

It seems like a pretty direct homage to the Infinite Improbability Drive from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which is created from thin air by working out exactly how improbable such a device is and plugging this number into a finite improbability generator (such machines themselves "often used to break the ice at parties by making all the molecules in the hostess's undergarments leap simultaneously one foot to the left, in accordance with the theory of indeterminacy.").

ldigas• 3 years ago

“Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one. But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.” ― Terry Pratchett, Mort

Toutouxc• 3 years ago

If we guess a President will serve on average about 6 years, then 1 in 6 times 4.0 million = 24 million babies will someday be President.

This sentence desperately needs parentheses. Took me five minutes to parse correctly.

Sebb767• 3 years ago

To save some time for the rest of us:

If we guess a President will serve on average about 6 years, then [1 in (6 times 4.0 million =) 24 million] babies will someday be President.

esrauch• 3 years ago

I prefer the interpretation of an ominous prediction that the presidency will be filled by 24 million babies someday soon.

Switzerland does have a committee of 7 people as president, only a small step from that to 24 million babies.

rbits• 3 years ago

I just assumed they had a mini stroke, I didn't realise there was a way for that to make sense

magic_hamster• 3 years ago

This was a nice read. Takes me back to Probability 101, which was a fairly eye opening experience, not only because of you get to learn the basis of a lot of research (sampling, deviation, etc) but also because of the many counter intuitive behaviors of actual randomness. It was a little bit like learning the physics of math, if that makes sense.

amelius• 3 years ago

Hash collisions ...

austin-cheney• 3 years ago

I used to tell people I was an order of magnitude more likely to die from a traffic related accident driving to work than from any hostile action during the two years I was in Afghanistan. People seemed challenged by that.

ttyprintk• 3 years ago

Reminds me of Jared Diamond explaining why he might not have taken a shower:

https://archive.ph/fNeaH

HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5145268

epolanski• 3 years ago

You weren't joking, and actually it's much more than a magnitude.

The chances of dying in a traffic accident in US are between 0.9 and 1.2%, whereas the mortality rate of US military servicemen in Afghanistan has been below 0.004%.

That's 3 order of magnitudes.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK2• 3 years ago

1.2% is over the lifetime. Don't know what the 0.0004% figure means, but in the active war phase coalition forces sustained 1-2%/year fatalities rate in Afghanistan https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/36/4/841/670068?login=f....

bongodongobob• 3 years ago

Probably because they are different time frames. Your chances of dying in Afghanistan are over say a 4 year period. When someone says you have a 1% chance of dying in a car accident, that's spread over a lifetime. The chance of someone dying in a car accident in that 4 year period is much lower.

nonameiguess3• 3 years ago

This often remains true even over smaller scales. For instance, between 2009 to 2012 I was in a combined arms battalion that deployed to Iraq twice and we experienced three deaths in combat and nine in traffic accidents near Fort Hood during those years. Another drowned in a lake near post. Also, one death due to suicide in theater.

GuB-42• 3 years ago

I think getting killed by a meteorite is in that order of magnitude.

But it is a bit of a tricky question. Because you can get hit by a small space rock, it has already happened but it is extremely rare, much less than 1 in a million, and I don't know if there is a record of anyone dying from it. But there is also a small chance of a massive impact killing billions in our lifetime, and intermediate scale events like if the Tunguska event happened in a populated area.

nine_k4• 3 years ago

There are records of people killed by meteorites, literally in single digits.

A simple statistical test would give you an idea. With 10B people on Earth, a "one in a million per lifetime chance" would happen to 10M people during their lifetimes. If we optimistically assume that a lifetime is 100 years, and the chances do not change with age, the event would affect 100k people every year.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK2• 3 years ago

hmm, looks like someone forgot how many millions are in a billion. Those millennials.

Snow_Falls3• 3 years ago

Your calculation is wrong, there are a thousand millions to the billion. If there was a 1/1,000,000 chance across 10 billion people, it would be 10,000 people affected.

urbandw311er• 3 years ago

It was fun to see this near-adjacent to the submission below. I wonder if one answers the other!

Q What has a 1 in a million chance
A https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38907620

nabla9• 3 years ago

"Not in a million years"–something that might happen once in a million years for an individual–happens over 8000 times per year for people on earth. Many of them have smartphones with camera to record the event. That's why we have an actual video where quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

ithkuil2• 3 years ago

My chance of dying because of a dinosaur-estinction-event-class asteroid hit is one in a 65 million years, thus every two and a half days on average a random person on earth dies being hit by an asteroid of that size.

davefol• 3 years ago

This implies that your death and all others are not correlated. I’d argue that if an asteroid hits the death correlation is almost 1.

nonameiguess3• 3 years ago

This is quite a good point. People often fail to make the distinction between something that happens once every million years to all individual organisms separately versus something that happens once ever million years to the planet itself. Our language is usually ambiguous about this.

supernewton2• 3 years ago

Similarly, Vatican City has slightly less than 6 popes per square mile.

feintruled• 3 years ago

Had to search for that video, I love things like this. I was not disappointed, so thanks for that. Really tickled me. Doesn't displace my favourite though: https://www.thewestmorlandgazette.co.uk/news/6922546.bull-br...

pitdicker2• 3 years ago

It may be nice to know the safety factors used for structural engineering of homes, offices and other regular buildings in the EU.

The Eurocode defines 3 consequence classes: CC1, CC2 and CC3. CC1 has the lowest consequence and is used for regular homes, light industry and agriculture. The chance of dying as a result of structural failure is low, 0.001. The chance for a CC2 building (apartment buildings, offices, hotels etc.) is defined as moderate with 0.03. And CC3 is for special buildings, such as large stadiums, with a high risk of death on structural failure, 0.3. There are other factors that go in defining a consequence class however, including economic and social concerns.

The consequence class maps to the chance that we find it acceptable for a building to collapse in a given year. Causes can be anything, like extreme weather. For CC1 this is 1 in 100, for CC2 1 in 10.000, for CC3 a chance of 1 in 100.000.

So the chance one or more people die in a stadium during a heavy storm due to structural failure could be 1 in 300.000 in a year if you purely look at the statistics behind the structural safety standard.

The statistics map to simple reference values for the loads of wind, snow, rain, usage etc. and easy safety factors. For example CC2 has a safety factor of 1,5 over all variable loads.

sd92• 3 years ago

The chance for a CC2 building (apartment buildings, offices, hotels etc.) is defined as moderate with 0.03

Does this mean 3% or 0.03%?

pitdicker2• 3 years ago

If a CC2 building collapses, the expectation is that in only about 3% of the cases this leads to someone dying. I don't know the complete reasoning, but can imagine some factors of why this number is far below 100%: a building is not always in use, there are often warning signs with time to escape, and collapse can be localized (not the whole building).

Recursing• 3 years ago

Reminds me of https://markxu.com/strong-evidence

«One time, someone asked me what my name was. I said, “Mark Xu.” Afterward, they probably believed my name was “Mark Xu.” I’m guessing they would have happily accepted a bet at 20:1 odds that my driver’s license would say “Mark Xu” on it.

The prior odds that someone’s name is “Mark Xu” are generously 1:1,000,000. Posterior odds of 20:1 implies that the odds ratio of me saying “Mark Xu” is 20,000,000:1, or roughly 24 bits of evidence. That’s a lot of evidence.»

«Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but extraordinary evidence might be more common than you think.»

mewpmewp22• 3 years ago

Someone offering that bet though would also alter the odds though. Because why would someone offer such a ridiculous bet after you've told your name, unless they had special information about your name? Although it being a possible YouTube prank channel would make it also possible that you actually have a chance to win for the reactions.

strken• 3 years ago

This is part of a very important principle: if someone approaches you about something, you should be far more suspicious than if you had randomly picked someone off the street.

The most well known application of this is teaching kids to ask a random shopkeeper for help if they get lost, but to not get in a stranger's car when offered a lift.

quickthrower23• 3 years ago

I would put the odds of Mark Xu’s license having that name on it at about 15%. Because Mark is probably an anglicised asian name.

anamexis• 3 years ago

The OP covers this a bit as well:

20 coin tosses (by me) all coming up Tails. YES
If you tossed the coins then the first answer would be NO, unless I'm very confident you lack the ability to fool me …

quickthrower23• 3 years ago

Why is the 20 multiplied by the million? Why not 0.95 multiplied by million?

Using the same argument I would accept infinite odds that my username is quickthrower2 so there is infinite information?

Strilanc4• 3 years ago

It's important to understand that when they said "bits" they didn't mean information in the Shannon entropy sense, but rather in the log-odds evidence sense.

Gaining a Shannon entropy bit means learning the answer to a yes-no question that had 1:1 odds.

Gaining a log-odds evidence bit means doubling your best-guess odds on a question you are uncertain about, from X:Y to (2X):Y.

One Shannon bit is worth arbitrarily many evidence bits, because a Shannon bit takes you from 1:1 odds to UNBOUNDEDLYHUGE:1 odds. So... yeah, actually, reading your username is worth infinite bits of log-odds evidence on what your username is! (Ignoring practical issues like the small chance of computer malfunctions, of course.)

And to answer your initial question: the 20 just came from the assertion they'd bet 20:1. That was arbitrary.

pavlov2• 3 years ago

This article seems to twist the definition of “extraordinary” to something clearly not intended by the original quote about claims and evidence.

Mark is a very common first name. Xu is a Chinese surname shared by over ten million people (according to Wikipedia). It’s entirely ordinary that someone would have this combination of names.

TomK322• 3 years ago

Don't ask me why, but I had to urge to look up the number of Chinese surnames: About 2000 are currently in use, half the Han Chinese population uses just 19 surnames. Quite low compared to the 850 THOUSAND (another source has more than a million) surnames used in Germany, twice as much as in Spain bespite it have a tradition of double-names. I guess Germany being such a central state with many migration waves over the last 600~800 years since family names have become common.

mathstuf• 3 years ago

Someone, yes. The person in front of you? Unlikely.

Analogy: someone has a winning lottery ticket. Is it the one in your hand? Probably not.

jameshart2• 3 years ago

24 bits seems about right for the information content of six Latin characters arranged in a pronounceable English orthography (the ‘X’ has pretty high information value though).

jodrellblank• 3 years ago

There's something so wrong with that logic. Imagine it as:

Mark: "I've thought of a number between one and a billion and written it down. The number I wrote down was 6,822,172"

Recursing (you): "ok"

Mark: "ohh you believe me? Then let's take a bet, if I did write down 6,822,172 then you win. If I wrote down any other number between one and a billion then I win".

Would you take that bet? I think you'd be suspicious.

Mark: "I predict that Recursing would take that bet, happily, because why wouldn't they believe me? Therefore them taking the bet is very strong evidence that I actually did write down 6,822,172".

You can't use your prediction about someone else's behaviour as evidence!

mattikl• 3 years ago

An interesting read. I was secretly hoping it would have delved more into the psychology of how we perceive that chance, what kind of biases we have. I feel we have a tendency of saying "it never fails" on probabilities which turn out to be much bigger than one in a million.

JohnKemeny• 3 years ago

Well, a wave hit it.

A wave hit it?

A wave hit the ship.

Is that unusual?

Oh yeah, at sea? Chance in a million!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM

rjmunro• 3 years ago

As I tell students, your grandmother is too sensible to be outdoors during a thunderstorm and a disproportional number of deaths are young men.

reminds me of https://xkcd.com/795/

defrost• 3 years ago

Your grandmother very probably doesn't work in a rail gang.

    ELEVEN members of a railway maintenance crew had to be taken to hospital on Saturday after lightning struck train tracks they were working on in WA’s Goldfields-Esperance region.

https://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/railway-maint...

nurettin• 3 years ago

This is a solved problem, otherwise casinos would go bankrupt.

FergusArgyll2• 3 years ago

This is very cool, you have to try to pick a random sequence of 1s and 0s and then shows you how not random it is.

https://calmcode.io/blog/inverse-turing-test.html

tasuki• 3 years ago

I passed everything up to and including the three digit sequences on my first try. 10 fail, 110 pass. I guess I'm random enough?

FergusArgyll2• 3 years ago

Did you ever consider becoming a software library when you grow up?

`from tasuki import random`

pranavgoyal• 3 years ago

Rolling 100 dice and landing the same number

stkdump• 3 years ago

More like 8 or 9 dice landing on the same number.

AndroTux• 3 years ago

Yeah, no. Read the article. There’s an example with a coin flip, which only has two possible values, and therefore a much, much higher possibility than a dice.

andirk• 3 years ago

Existing is such an unlikely chance that it's more likely we don't.

n_sd• 3 years ago

Found a fun CgpGrey video on 1 in a million experience. [here](https://youtu.be/PmWQmZXYd74?si=BDBkrfxEXgAgeRfw)

bitshiftfaced• 3 years ago

Is there a word for what he's doing with his voice in this video? Vsauce does the same thing. It's a strange cadence that would make me lift an eyebrow if someone was speaking to me like that in real life. It's like if captain Kirk removed emotion from his voice and began to lecture you.

Tempest1981• 3 years ago

The Linguistics of 'YouTube Voice'

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10693664

From 2015, so the style might have changed

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10695754

blt2• 3 years ago

Wendover Productions is another major offender.

putzdown• 3 years ago

From the article: “24 million babies will someday be President.” This seems an improbable claim. Is he saying something sensible by virtue of the surrounding analysis that I’m just not following?

lindenr• 3 years ago

Yeah, I think it's a typo and should have been "one in every 24 million babies" - this makes sense given the numbers, with 4 million born every year but only a new president every 6 years.

throw_pm23• 3 years ago

The parsing is ambiguous, read it with parentheses as follows: 1 in (6 times 4.0 million = 24 million) babies will someday be President

MobileVet• 3 years ago

I absolutely love the “Becker Bottle”. It gives you the ability to truly visualize this concept. Super fun to play with and a great learning aid for chemistry classes.

https://www.flinnsci.com/becker-bottle-one-in-a-million/ap45...

walthamstow2• 3 years ago

Wonderful concept. Thanks for bringing to my attention

Rygian• 3 years ago

From a sibling submission in front page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort

"Micromort" is a unit of risk defined as a one-in-a-million chance of death, […] used to measure the riskiness of various day-to-day activities.

dtgriscom3• 3 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_(unit)

geocrasher• 3 years ago

Lloyd Christmas and Mary Swanson.

dstroot• 3 years ago

Reminds me of “one in a million is next Tuesday”:

https://jeffgarretson.blog/2014/07/17/one-in-a-million-is-ne...

Worth a read if you are an SRE.

eep_social• 3 years ago

I like the formulation, “at 100 rps one in a million is 8.6 times each day.”

ferociouskite56• 3 years ago

On government insurance you have 1 in a million+ chance to be assigned an unbiased, compassionate to pain, not anti-engineer psychiatrist.

erostrate• 3 years ago

The following are all ~ 1 in a million chance of death, or 1 micromort:

Travelling 6 miles (9.7 km) by motorcycle

Travelling 17 miles (27 km) by walking

Travelling 20 miles (32 km) by bicycle

Travelling 230 miles (370 km) by car

Travelling 1,000 miles (1,600 km) by jet

Travelling 6,000 miles (9,656 km) by train

But switching from car to bicycle for short trips still increases life expectancy due to health effects.

Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2920084/

teaearlgraycold• 3 years ago

As a cyclist that’s trying to not die, I also have to assume this heavily depends on where you’re cycling. Along a stroad? You’re dead. Country road with more bikes than cars? Much safer.

hughesjj• 3 years ago

Also you can rack up miles on the interstate like no one's business on a road trip etc. imo it should be by unit time not unit distance but I could see the argument for distance

Same with planes. Like yeah if you wanted to make the same trip without a plane it's way more dangerous but what if you just wouldn't take the train from coast to coast in the first place?

IDK, imo time is the most important tradeoff for transport when doing per capital/etc measurements

drzaiusapelord• 3 years ago

Chicago to LA is about 2,000 miles.

So in the article about 200 miles driving (in California) is 1 in a million chance of dying. So lets use that number nationwide to be lazy.

Now we can move a decimal point over. So the death chances of a Chicago to LA drive is 100,000 in one. But you drive back, so then its that twice. Once in 50,000 people dying on a Chicago to LA and back roadtrip is extremely frightening. How many people from the midwest make this drive a year? Or from the east coast? How many don't make it back?

The USA, on average, has 100+ fatalities via auto transportation a day.

The above ignores serious injury, permanent disability, etc. Its just death. The chances of having to deal with a broken spine, losing a limb, blindness, 3rd degree burns all over your body, etc aren't even calculated, but those are real and far more common than death. Death being harder to achieve with modern medical treatments.

Cars are extremely dangerous. We downplay what it means to drive.

tyingq• 3 years ago

We downplay what it means to drive

I wondered about that reading some of the comments about the 737 Max. We routinely travel in exponentially more risky ways all the time, yet we expend time thinking about the safety benefit of avoiding a specific type of aircraft.

Not downplaying airline safety as a whole there, but thinking about it for yourself on a personal level is maybe not moving the needle.

bee_rider• 3 years ago

I wonder if it would be worth it to express unlikely events like this in powers of Dunbar’s number? Round it down to 100 to make the math easier, and also because there’s a lot of overlap in social networks. One million is 100^3, so in your acquaintances-of-acquaintances-of-acquaintances network there’s an expected value of one person who has to deal with this one in a million problem, I think, right?

nonameiguess3• 3 years ago

Only if there is no overlap whatsoever in who is an acquaintance versus who is an acquaintance of an acquaintance. That is extremely unlikely. I'm sure there exists some data out there on how quickly an average social graph grows as a function of degrees of separation that can be used, however.

djkivi• 3 years ago

Cosmo Kramer : Have you ever met a proctologist? Well, they usually have a very good sense of humor. You meet a proctologist at a party, don't walk away. Plant yourself there, because you will hear the funniest stories you've ever heard. See, no one wants to admit to them that they stuck something up there. Never! It's always an accident. Every proctologist story ends in the same way: "It was a million to one shot, Doc. Million to one!"

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0697702/characters/nm0000632

OnlyMortal• 3 years ago

Martians coming to Earth and, specifically, to the Woking area near London.

bigmattystyles• 3 years ago

since we're having a bit of fun:

Mary: "I'd say.. more like one out of a million." Lloyd: (slowly reacts) "So you're telling me there's a chance? … yeah!!"

Dumb and Dumber (1994)

3737hdhd7372• 3 years ago

Reminds me of working on a service with a huge amount of traffic

What I found interesting was how often edge cases would occur with that much traffic

Something that would be really difficult to reproduce locally would happen like 100 times a week if you looked at the logs

oatmeal1• 3 years ago

It's all availability heuristic. If you can think of an example, you think it's more likely.

“Hundreds of children die every year in drowning accidents,” he says. “We need lifeguards at pools more than armed guards at schools.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/sorrow-and-precaution-n...

https://news.gallup.com/poll/266681/nearly-half-fear-victim-...

yboris2• 3 years ago

My favorite mental visualization I came up with: imagine driving from New Jersey to Florida (substitute with a long drive you had). Mine was about 1,200 miles which at 60 miles per hour is 20 hours. That's 72,000 seconds of mind-numbing driving.

Now if during the entire, exhausting, 20 hours of driving, you press a button, and it falls within the "danger zone" that lasts 15 seconds, you lose.

The above example is better when looking at lottery winning chances (worse than 1 in million) - where you can imagine having to throw a quarter out of the window, hoping for it to land within the proper 1 inch section of the road.

I like this example because it gives you visceral feeling - allowing you to think in terms of lengths of road or length of time to compare various odds.

DeRock• 3 years ago

15 seconds danger zone / 72,000 seconds of driving = 1 in 4,800

Any reason you chose those numbers? Trying to understand the significance of those odds.

slap_shot• 3 years ago

Also curious! But even that does help to appreciate what a 1:4800 chance something is. I really like that frame of reference.

yboris2• 3 years ago

So sorry -- I think I got distracted while writing (doing things around the house) and got the math wrong :'(

I wanted something around 1:1million odds

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF• 3 years ago

imagine having to throw a quarter out of the window, hoping for it to land within the proper 1 inch section of the road

This idea also helps to illustrate something which is intuitive to me but seemingly hard to explain. Sometimes when an event occurs people will exclaim, "Wow, what are the odds of that?!" and then if it turns out to be a seemingly unlikely event, then it becomes "wow, it's crazy that happened!".

But it's really not. Using the pull-quote as an example, it's the difference between 1) throwing the quarter out the window and drawing a circle around where it lands and 2) drawing a circle on the ground, hoping to land the quarter in it when it's thrown. Of course the exact result in the first case was unlikely but nobody predicted it so it's uninteresting.

IshKebab• 3 years ago

It's because they think "that" is "meeting Dave from my previous job on holiday in Turin!" but it's actually "meeting one of the hundreds of acquaintances you've picked up over your life at any point when you're away from home at any time".

rcar1046• 3 years ago

Anything with a 50/50 accomplished 20 times in a row is right around 1,000,000 : 1.

Delk• 3 years ago

The last one -- a young man's 1 in 1000 lifetime chance of getting breast cancer -- is actually quite curious: it's not that much lower than his chance of getting testicular cancer, which apparently has an approximately 1 in 250 lifetime chance (I assume in the US). [1]

And apparently a man is about equally likely to die from breast cancer as he is from testicular cancer: both have a lifetime chance of about 1 in 5000.

[1] https://www.cancer.org/cancer/types/testicular-cancer/about/...

WhitneyLand• 3 years ago

One of my favorite GPT-4 mistakes mentioned

Struck by a Meteorite: The odds of a person being struck by a meteorite are estimated to be about one in 1.6 million.

I wonder how plausible things like this seem to people…

fsckboy• 3 years ago

i immediately thought of the 2^20th examples. I often marvel at the 2^10th is 1000ish coincidence

but people say things like "1 in a million" because it sounds incalculably rare, so I'm not sure I understand the goal here? to make an exaggeration sit on an intuitive scale as if it was meant literally? if successful that will make being "literally one in a million" fall out of favor just as literally has.

one thing I took away from modestly extensive study of linguistics was, people need to stop thinking that words have strict definitions, and realize that words adopt definitions to suit what people are trying to say. What did they mean is more important than what did they say.

What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)

Related Stories