Eli5: How do probabilities work?

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Someone says “you have 1 out of 370 chances to win a bottle of water”

and you win 2 consecutive times in a row, what does that mean? i’m lucky or the probability is wrong?

In: Mathematics

8 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

This is an interesting question. If you knew for sure the chances are 1 out of 370 and you get to win 2, 10, 100 or wathever times in row you just got lucky enough because the *truth* is that the chances are 1 out of 370. But in practice how can you know this is the truth? At some point you have to ask yourself what is more likely, winning 100 times in a row or those odds being wrong?

And hence in statistics there’s aslo the concept of “the odds of the odds”. How likely it is that some odds are right given what you have observed so far. If you threw a coin 10 times and got 8 heads, you could say yeah it’s more likely for a biassed coin to produce this results but it’s quite likely for a fair coin as well, so there’s very little evidence that the coin is unfair. However if the coin comes heads 800 of 1000 times then the evidence becomes much stronger and there are ways to quantify this.

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