Re: hal still doesn't understand basic Bernoulli Trial (was: Re: Xiaou? [taptap] Is this thing on?)


"Jerry B. Altzman" <jbaltz@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:Cg9Yf.73$yZ6.20@xxxxxxxxxxx
On 4/1/2006 11:38 PM, WannabeSomeone wrote:
That Jerry nut probably did not know I studied Electrical Engineering in university.

That Jerry nut doesn't much care: you still got it wrong. It's the gambler's fallacy.



Probability and Statistics is also used in Social Sciences. For example, it is used in predicting population movement, and the number of homicides that one may expect in a year based on previous samples from the population. Each individual person has a mind of its own and the person won't alter his/her behaviour on purpose to satisfy someone's predictions, but in a city with large enough population we can predict with high accuracy how many car accident fatalities, how many new births, and how many homicides in a year. When the outcome deviates too much from the previous year, Social Scientist will have to figure out the reason for the deviation.

Similarly, in the coin toss example, the logical prediction of the outcome of a large enough number of tosses is 50/50. If the number of heads and tails differ too much from 50/50 in a thousand of tosses, the only explanation is that the coin is not a fair coin. It is true that the outcome of each individual toss is a random event, but it will always satisfy the 50/50 rule when large enough samples are taken. You cannot expect to have 1000 heads in 1000 tosses and still say that is a fair coin. You can easily prove that yourself by tossing a coin one thousand times. It will always be close to 50/50. That means if your first 700 tosses end up with much more heads than tails, the probability of getting tails in each of your last 300 tosses will be higher than heads.


Wannabe
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