Mikefule
Justified & Ancient
- Joined
- Dec 9, 2009
- Messages
- 1,282
- Location
- Lincolnshire UK
South African lottery. The balls drawn are 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and the Power Ball: 10.
There were 20 winners, sharing the prize, which is more winners than usual.
This random sequence of balls is exactly as probable as any other sequence. All that is unusual about it is that the numbers are consecutive.
There are many other "sequences" that would be equally "remarkable": 1,2,3,4,5,6, for example, or 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, or perhaps 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, or... well, you get the idea.
A rational person might speculate that most people would choose birthdays, and the like. They might therefore choose six consecutive numbers themself, in the hope that few people would do the same. It would look like a way of increasing your probable share of the prize.
As there are more other rational people around than rational people like to assume, it turned out that 20 had chosen these numbers: a higher number than usually chooses a "more obviously random" selection.
But now there are cries of "Scam" and calls for an investigation. Such a sequence "can't be merely a coincidence," they say.
However, surely a scammer capable of fixing the draw would make it less obvious.
This says so much about how people think, or fail to think clearly.
It also feeds into our shared interest in Forteana, where we make similarly erroneous assumptions about levels of probability when considering anomalous events or coincidences.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-55154525
There were 20 winners, sharing the prize, which is more winners than usual.
This random sequence of balls is exactly as probable as any other sequence. All that is unusual about it is that the numbers are consecutive.
There are many other "sequences" that would be equally "remarkable": 1,2,3,4,5,6, for example, or 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, or perhaps 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, or... well, you get the idea.
A rational person might speculate that most people would choose birthdays, and the like. They might therefore choose six consecutive numbers themself, in the hope that few people would do the same. It would look like a way of increasing your probable share of the prize.
As there are more other rational people around than rational people like to assume, it turned out that 20 had chosen these numbers: a higher number than usually chooses a "more obviously random" selection.
But now there are cries of "Scam" and calls for an investigation. Such a sequence "can't be merely a coincidence," they say.
However, surely a scammer capable of fixing the draw would make it less obvious.
This says so much about how people think, or fail to think clearly.
It also feeds into our shared interest in Forteana, where we make similarly erroneous assumptions about levels of probability when considering anomalous events or coincidences.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-55154525
