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
It probably just means you got very lucky.
If you spin a roulette wheel where the odds are 1 in 370, that means that people will win 1/370th of the time on average, “in the long run.” When we talk about long-run probabilities, it’s kinda like we’re imagining an infinite number of trials. If you spun it a million times, or a billion, or a trillion, then you would get closer and closer to 1/370th winning spins overall. The more trials, the closer a correspondence we expect between the odds and the actual outcomes. This is called the ‘law of large numbers.’
It might be easier to think about it in terms of coin tosses. If you tossed a coin 4 times, it’s entirely possible that you might get 3 tails and 1 heads. That’s a very ordinary outcome, not too wild a coincidence at all. Even though the theoretical odds are 50/50 and your results are 75/25. But if you tossed the coin 100 times in a row, it would be almost unthinkably unlikely for you to get 75 tails and 25 heads. As the number grows large, the likelihood of big deviations grows small.
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