Re:The difference betwen skill and luck.
by frossie on Wednesday February 09, 2011 @04:13PM
(#2199379)
Exploitations of people's failure to understand statistics are a lot older than email.
Even in my grandmother's time there would be somebody who would offer to predict the gender of your unborn child - "if I am wrong, I'll give you your money back!".
Reminds me of http://xkcd.com/628/
Re:The difference betwen skill and luck.
by ngsayjoe on Thursday February 10, 2011 @06:04AM
(#2201525)
Warren buffet says what if all that predict successfully come from the same village, wouldnt that tells you something?
Re:The difference betwen skill and luck.
by khafra on Thursday February 10, 2011 @10:13AM
(#2202128)
The same rules of probability apply, so it depends on the number of villages making predictions divided by the improbability of successfully matching that village's predictions. If there were only 10 or 20 people buying lottery tickets, and one of them actually won, I'd pay very close attention to that one person's methods.
Re:The difference betwen skill and luck.
by lotusleaf1987 on Wednesday February 09, 2011 @04:19PM
(#2199398)
That scam is an old one going back at the least to newspapers in the early 1900s. Specifically, sports prediction services did it in classified ads (and continue to do so in some places). I think most con-artist scams haven't really changed, just adopted new mediums and new technologies.
You find 256 people and email them the details of a 50/50 prediction. 128 people should get the right prediction. You then email them another 50/50 prediction. Of course, 64 of them receive the right prediction twice in a row. You then make a third 50/50 prediction to the 64, another to the 32 positive responses and so on until you find a manageable number of people who now believe you have some amazing insight into the future.
As much as we may want to think things are not random, sometimes they really are, sometimes they're just probabilities.