Shaped Charges – Sheet of copper going through 1ft of solid steel (2010) [video]

Re:Shaped Charges – Sheet of copper going through 1ft of sol... by bawolff on Sunday May 15, 2022 @02:55AM (#31385756)

But the important odds in this situation is not the individual, but the group - if you start with a group of 100 (or whatever) people extraordinarily bad at their job, what is the probability at least 1 makes it 40 years.

Survivorship bias is a bias because the sample is biased - Its when you pick a group of people who have already won and then are surprised that they beat the odds and won because you confuse the probability that a specific person wins with the probability that at least 1 person wins.

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Re:Shaped Charges – Sheet of copper going through 1ft of sol... by dmurray on Sunday May 15, 2022 @07:57AM (#31387024)

Actually, the important odds are: given that you've met a 75-year old explosives professional, how likely is it that he was skilful instead of lucky?

To get a good estimate of this you need to come up with some priors about how many skilful and unskillful equivalents there were at the age of 30 and how much worse the unskillful ones are at staying alive.

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