Why do we need probability theory in life
It was under this title that we conducted a webinar - " Why do we need a theory of probabilities in life ?"
In the webinar we didn’t touch “yellow” topics like “ how to win at the casino ” and “ 100% way to get a million without registration and SMS ”.
On the contrary, more serious ones were affected. Here is the webinar itself:
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For example, in the statistics industry, there is more money than in the arms trade, drugs and people combined. One little-known English scientist in the 18th century used life expectancy statistics (the so-called actuarial tables compiled by Halley, who also discovered Halley’s comet) and started a business that has now become an entire industry, the world's No. 1 business. And you also participate in it every day, consciously or not, for example, when you go to work.
The idea of a similar mathematical apparatus is used in India: you can buy a ticket from the mafia and ride in public transport for free, and the mafia will pay for the fines you receive. It is called “hafta” and is beneficial to you and the mafia, but not to the state.
The lottery mechanism is sorted out in detail - how the distribution of funds goes and how the game takes place on emotions, when one winner is shown on TV and millions of losers are not. This idea was drawn from a TED talk about erroneous expectations .
It also describes the discovery of the law of large numbers and its application now.
And looking at the crime map of a country, you can easily see that in some regions it is 3 times less likely to become a victim of crime than in others. The term “crime rate” itself is statistical, it is a quantitative characteristic of crime, and it is worth noting that when such an approach to the assessment of crime was first introduced in 1832 in France, it caused confusion because of the stability of the data obtained.
More topics covered in the webinar:
By the way, the following fact was used in the webinar announcement: in May 2015, Russia lost control of the Progress spacecraft. How to calculate whether the device will fall on land (or on a specific country). Can you answer? In our opinion, this is a great example to illustrate a geometric approach for calculating probabilities.
In the webinar we didn’t touch “yellow” topics like “ how to win at the casino ” and “ 100% way to get a million without registration and SMS ”.
On the contrary, more serious ones were affected. Here is the webinar itself:
')
For example, in the statistics industry, there is more money than in the arms trade, drugs and people combined. One little-known English scientist in the 18th century used life expectancy statistics (the so-called actuarial tables compiled by Halley, who also discovered Halley’s comet) and started a business that has now become an entire industry, the world's No. 1 business. And you also participate in it every day, consciously or not, for example, when you go to work.
The idea of a similar mathematical apparatus is used in India: you can buy a ticket from the mafia and ride in public transport for free, and the mafia will pay for the fines you receive. It is called “hafta” and is beneficial to you and the mafia, but not to the state.
The lottery mechanism is sorted out in detail - how the distribution of funds goes and how the game takes place on emotions, when one winner is shown on TV and millions of losers are not. This idea was drawn from a TED talk about erroneous expectations .
It also describes the discovery of the law of large numbers and its application now.
And looking at the crime map of a country, you can easily see that in some regions it is 3 times less likely to become a victim of crime than in others. The term “crime rate” itself is statistical, it is a quantitative characteristic of crime, and it is worth noting that when such an approach to the assessment of crime was first introduced in 1832 in France, it caused confusion because of the stability of the data obtained.
More topics covered in the webinar:
- how TV channels like ORT rate TV programs,
- how a serious attitude towards statistics helped to make the Japanese economic miracle (and how this is reflected in the different series “Back to the Future”),
- increased conversion in business and SEO (the conversion itself can be considered as a probability),
- normal distribution on the example of the length of noses, and how everything that goes beyond 3 sigma becomes the object of fairy tales and television news,
- how google translate uses statistics to determine text language.
By the way, the following fact was used in the webinar announcement: in May 2015, Russia lost control of the Progress spacecraft. How to calculate whether the device will fall on land (or on a specific country). Can you answer? In our opinion, this is a great example to illustrate a geometric approach for calculating probabilities.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/298898/
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