statistics [Theme] Page 3

Kahneman and Tversky noticed that people are able to think seriously about the seemingly unlikely events, if you engage them in discussion of such phenomena and to give the feel that these events are not so unreal. For example, if you ask a person, what is the probability of death in a plane crash, he is likely to inflate the figure.

According to the psychologist Paul Slavich and his colleagues, people imagine are more willing to pay for insurance against terrorist attacks than plane crashes (although the number of recent terrorist acts includes as a special case). <...>
At the same time, according to Slovic, the insurance people usually neglect events with low probability. This can be formulated as follows: people prefer insurance against possible small losses, while less probable but much more severe losses are not taken into account.

Which of these situations, in your opinion, more likely?
1. Joey, apparently, was happily married. He killed his wife.
2. Joey, apparently, was happily married. He killed his wife, to take possession of her inheritance.
Certainly, obeying the first impression, you say, more likely the second option, although this is pure logical fallacy, because the first statement is broader and involves more than one possible cause, but many: joy killed his wife because he is mad, or because she cheated on him with the postman and the ski instructor, or because in a state of confusion, he took her for a financial forecasting.

Psychologists Kahneman and Tversky <...> made the experiment: the subjects (and these were people whose profession is associated with the preparation of the forecasts) were asked to rate the probability of two events:
a) in America will happen a huge flood, which will die more than a thousand people;
b) an earthquake in California will cause severe flooding, which will killed more than a thousand people.
According to the respondents, the first variant is less probable than the second: the earthquake in California is the reason that easy to make and that makes the flood situation more representable, thereby increasing its probability in our eyes.
Similarly, if I ask: "what do you think, how many of your fellow citizens sick with lung cancer?" - you call any number (let's say half a million). However, if I ask, how many people in your country did develop lung cancer as a result of Smoking, the number you called, will be much (perhaps, as in two or three times) more. If the cause of the phenomenon, this phenomenon seems much more plausible and much more likely. Cancer from Smoking is easier to believe than cancer without a cause (if the cause is unclear, it's like, what it is not).

In 1971, the psychologists Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky decided to torture professors of statistics questions, formulated as statistical issues. One was approximately as follows (for clarity, I changed example): imagine that you live in a city where there are two hospitals - one large, the other small. On a certain day in one of these two hospitals is born with 60% of boys. What hospital this might happen? A Professor made a mistake (during normal conversation), calling a large hospital, while the essence of statistics is that large samples are more stable and have less deviations from the long-term average (in this case 50 percent of each sex) than a small sample. These professors would have failed the exams that they themselves accept. Still working as a quantum engineer, I identified hundreds of such serious mistakes made by statisticians who forgot that they statistics.

The masses seem to me worthy of attention only in three respects: first of all, as bad copies of great men, produced on bad paper with worn plates and then, as a reaction to the great people and finally as a weapon of great men; for the rest, damn them and damn statistics!

Statistics such data does not have how many people the creeps, and how many flies.

Weird. Ninety-five percent of people I can't tell the truth because they will not understand or will be offended. Ninety-five percent of the people never speak the truth to me, because I would be offended. Myself I in ten cases out of a hundred can't say the truth because I would be scared.

Statistics in the earlier convinced Jenny, loses all meaning when it comes to you, let you be the only person out of thousands who are struck by lightning, or the girl whose father won't come home, no matter if he crashed in the car on a slippery road or sitting in a prison cell.

According to statistics, single men resorted to suicide four times more often than single women.

- Here, as with any statistics, he said. - Ably it podtasovyvaya, you can prove anything.

Statistics is a science, statistics is a science.

Statistics are just like mini-skirts - they give you good ideas but hide the most important things.
Statistics are like mini skirts - they give you good ideas but hide the most important thing.

According to statistics, every day 65 people become millionaires - this idea haunts me.