5 posts tagged 'statistics'

2023

Ninety-Nine Heads

On the topic of academia vs intuition of real people, Taleb has a funny, but illuminating story. It goes like this:

You toss a fair coin 99 times and it comes up heads every time. What is the chance of heads on the next toss?

If you ask a normal …

2023

2023

Probability Space vs Consequence Space

Since I have been writing about unexpected statistical outcomes due to skews in the dataset, I thought I'd take a look at Nassim Taleb's twitter to see what he has been tweeting about. I came across this tweet

Taleb tweet on ChatGPT

This is quite an interesting tweet. Taleb mentions two terms: Probability space …

2023

Statistics is Unintuitive (Part 2)

Here is another day to day situation where statistics can be very unintuitive.

Lets say we have a medical test that has 99 % accuracy. You take the test and it comes out positive. What is the chance that you are actually positive? Common sense would suggest that there is a …

2023

Statistics is Unintuitive

I routinely come across day to day situations where statistics can be very unintuitive. Consider the case where we are designing an algorithm to identify some outlier - say credit card fraud as an example. Assume I design an algorithm and it is 99.99 % accurate.

Sounds impressive?

That is until …