{"id":689,"date":"2009-09-01T02:59:34","date_gmt":"2009-09-01T00:59:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.genista.de\/engine\/?p=689"},"modified":"2009-09-22T21:15:25","modified_gmt":"2009-09-22T19:15:25","slug":"unlikely-likelihoods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.genista.de\/engine\/?p=689","title":{"rendered":"unlikely likelihoods"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Maybe it’s because I’m cranky today, maybe it is because the represenation, or lack thereof, of mathematics in popular and high culture is a constant annoyance to me. Or maybe it is because it is deeply mystifying to me how someone as learned as David Foster Wallace can screw up so badly with numbers; anywho.<\/p>\n

I’ve advanced to page 259 of Infinite Jest now, the book gets better and better, but then this: “a 54 match conclusion [of a 108 match tournament] is extremely unlikely – odds being 1 in 227<\/sup>“. Whoa, hold on. Really?<\/p>\n

So Wallace gets the binomial distribution wrong, big deal, you might say – the correct probability for a draw is about 0.0766 or 1 in 13, by the way – but that’s not what irks me. How could a number so wildly implausible sail unchecked past both his and his editor’s critical skills? In a tournament with 108 matches, there is 109 possible outcomes (from team A loses all, to team A wins all). The average probability of each outcome then is 1\/109. Now if the two teams are equally matched, a draw is the most likely of all these outcomes, making their average (1\/109) a lower<\/i> limit on the actual probability. For this kind of reasoning you need no binomial, no probability distribution, just a little bit of mathematical common sense. Which, for some odd reason, seems to be a rather rare commodity.
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Maybe it’s because I’m cranky today, maybe it is because the represenation, or lack thereof, of mathematics in popular and high culture is a constant annoyance to me. Or maybe it is because it is deeply mystifying to me how someone as learned as David Foster Wallace can screw up so badly with numbers; anywho. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,22,65,19,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-englisch","category-good","category-infinite-jest","category-nonfiction","category-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.genista.de\/engine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.genista.de\/engine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.genista.de\/engine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genista.de\/engine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genista.de\/engine\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.genista.de\/engine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/689\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.genista.de\/engine\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genista.de\/engine\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genista.de\/engine\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}