![]() ![]() Think of Warren Weaver’s Lady Luck, Brian Everitt’s Chance Rules, Leonard Mlodinow’s The Drunkard’s Walk, John Haigh’s Taking Chances, Jeffrey Rosenthal’s Struck by Lightning, and Joseph Mazur’s What’s Luck Got To Do With It?. It has also led to a mini-genre of popular books on the subject. This has led to a collection of results termed paradoxes or fallacies, though they’re not really paradoxes, and the fallacies lie not in probabilistic reasoning but in uninformed interpretations of probability. ![]() One of the characteristics of probability is that it can produce results which appear counterintuitive without careful thought (and formal mathematics). ![]() Xiao-Li wrote, “Winning the lottery or being struck by lightning are both events with extremely small probabilities, events any statistically sound mind should not expect.” But the subtitle of my book (in the US) is Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day, and the examples I give include both being struck by lightning and winning the lottery. ![]() Reading my co-columnist Xiao-Li Meng’s column The XL-Files in the January/February 2015 issue made me realise I hadn’t written a column about The Improbability Principle, my book which appeared early in 2014. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |