One Redditor was curious to know whether people had such experiences. So they went on to ask people, “What is the lowest probability event you have personally witnessed?” The thread got almost 4k answers, and people had plenty of experiences to share. From witnessing lottery wins to the unlikely coincidences of meeting people you’re somehow connected to, people shared all sorts of things. We here at Bored Panda wanted to know more about why statistically improbable things fascinate us so much. So we reached out to Christopher T. Franck, an associate professor in the Department of Statistics at Virginia Tech. He was kind enough to explain what qualifies as a statistically improbable event and why they surprise us so much.
blueova23 , RDNE Stock project / pexels Report
But how do we know which things are probable and which are not? “As humans, it is often extremely difficult for us to know how probable events are,” Associate Professor of Statistics Chris Franck says.
“How likely is it that my favorite sports team will win the championship next season? What is the chance that someone I care about will recover from a serious disease? Do I have a large enough investment portfolio to comfortably retire in the next five years? Is it going to rain this weekend? We yearn to know how probable these events are.”
dandroid_design , Royal Broi / flickr Report
mourninglark , Watts / flickr Report
So, for us to determine whether a thing has low probability or high probability, there have to be two conditions, Franck says. The first is a carefully analyzed set of data about similar events. The second is that the event has to be uncommon or nonexistent in the collected data.
“Executing a large-scale data analysis is not quite as simple as I make it sound in the above explanation,” Franck adds. “We typically require a team of statistical data analysts and also relevant domain experts, such as medical doctors, meteorologists, etc. Conducting research is expensive, and it frequently takes years to finish projects.”
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One of them is purely the fact that something rare just happened, something we ‘didn’t think should happen.’ “But rarity alone doesn’t really capture the imagination,” Franck observes. I do not think it would make headlines if I played a one-in-a-billion game of solitaire."
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“So what we are really reacting to is the combined effects of a rare event that is also incredible. We simply ignore extremely rare events that are uninteresting, such as my game of solitaire,” Franck explains.
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“If you think of a rare event as a coin flip with an incredibly small chance of flipping heads, then remember that millions or billions of these coins are being flipped in any given domain every day. A certain number of rare events should happen by chance alone.”
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“Attaching meaning to the things that happen in our lives is generally a spiritual rather than statistical activity. In their professional role, statisticians might be content to determine how improbable an event is relative to existing data.”
“The bigger questions in life, such as the meaning behind why things happen the way they do, are of general interest to all humans but also beyond the scope of what statistics alone can provide,” the professor notes.
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cheesesteak_genocide , Rachel Claire / pexels Report
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Aggressive-Ad5292 , Pavel Polyakov / pexels Report
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cardew-vascular , Magda Ehlers / pexels Report
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Clear-Penalty339 , Rachel Claire / pexels Report
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