I’ve been reading The Drunkards Walk – How Randomness Rules our lives. Really interesting! The main points being:
- most things depend on chance – many more than you might think
- Humans are really, really bad at understanding chance and probability
- The history of math (and probability in particular) is really interesting.
Some examples: ‘
Hot hand’ or streaks in sports (and movie producing, and corporate earnings, and investment returns) are accounted for by random chance, _even though they seem like they aren’t_. Firing the coach or CEO for bad team performance is basically performative.
The notation we use today is relatively recent. The equals sign was invented not that long ago, + and – have been used for a while, but not in the way we use them today. This makes the development of early mathematics even more amazing. I want to make a timeline of developments in Math.
Two students miss an exam and lie to the professor: we had a flat tire. The professor asks each of them separately: which tire? What are the chances they both pick the same one? (1 in 4, although my intuition says 1 in 16 or higher).
More late on the methods used to determine probability, so I can maybe remember this another day.
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