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A comment on Goldman Sachs model to predict World Cup game results didn’t come close.

Re:Goldman Sachs model to predict World Cup game results did... by msravi on Monday July 16, 2018 @08:23AM (#17540706)
Duh. Looks like there's a fundamental misunderstanding of how statistics works all around. The probability of an event does NOT predict a particular outcome. Ever. It only says that if the experiment is performed again and again and again, like a few thousand times, then X% of those will match that probability.

If I toss a fair coin you cannot predict the next outcome. You can only say that if I toss the coin a 1000 times, then close to 500 are going to turn up heads, and another 500 are going to turn up tails.

It was stupid of Goldman Sachs or whoever to predict an outcome. It was stupid of anyone else to lend credence to that prediction.

Hopefully, Goldman Sachs is not relying on prediction of singular outcomes to make their investment decisions. I don't think they are. Probably just marketing brouhaha to ride the soccer wave. Although I'm not sure if that worked as expected.

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Re:Goldman Sachs model to predict World Cup game results did... by Sean1708 on Monday July 16, 2018 @10:37AM (#17541573)
> It was stupid of Goldman Sachs or whoever to predict an outcome.

If you read the actual report they did[0], they never claimed that any single outcome was more than 18.5% likely.

[0]: http://www.goldmansachs.com/our-thinking/pages/world-cup-201...

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Re:Goldman Sachs model to predict World Cup game results did... by pbhjpbhj on Monday July 16, 2018 @08:46AM (#17540846)
I agree completely with your opening remarks.

>"You can only say that if I toss the coin a 1000 times, then close to 500 are going to turn up heads, and another 500 are going to turn up tails."

Sometimes you can do that and every single flip will be heads. It's unlikely, and across zillions of universes you'd only find it once - but we don't have a pool of universes that we can sample statistically.

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