NOTE: This is a re-post from my old blog. I thought I’d bring it over. Read on at your own peril.
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Statistically speaking, there will be 6 crimes of violence this year for every 1000 people in London right now.
Departing from raw statistical data for a moment, allow me to divulge what solidified my current thoughts.
I watched a show recently about a guy that had figured out a system to predict horse race results. The show followed one person that had been invited to participate in the system, and it was incredible. They had won 5 races in a row by picking the winning horse and putting all their funds on it.
The guy with the system, in order to prove its effectiveness in predicting results of seemingly random events, proceeds to predict that he will flip a coin 10 times and get heads every time. And he does it. Could it be faked? Sure, of course. I work in fooling the camera, so yeah. It could be faked. But without being a fiction show (which it wasn’t), the horse races could not be falsified, and the coin toss accompanying it is very validating.
But after he does the coin toss, he reveals the system to the participant. The system was this. They took the probabilities and introduced that many participants. Thousands of participants, each given a ‘winning’ horse to bet on. One group would win out of six, they’d dismiss the non-winners and refund their money, thanking them for participating. That winning group would be split up for the next race, and so on. So the group gets divided every time until you get down to 1 person that has won every race. They threw the numbers at it and statistically it is going to happen with enough participants, no matter how unlikely it is.
Improbable is not impossible.
So with the coin toss, he flipped the coin all day long and recorded it until he got 10 heads in a row. Given enough tosses, it will happen, however unlikely.
My point (solidified by this experiment) is this. It is unlikely that something bad is going to happen to my son. Or Sarah. But it is not impossible, only improbable. We see it on the news all the time. Statistically, some poor parents are going to be parted with their child in a terrible accident.
So this is why I’ve been criticised for being more cautious than the average guy. Looking both ways before crossing the street a little more diligently than necessary. Locking the doors and the windows at night, even windows off the ground floor. Reading more about a new toy online than I have to before handing it to the wee boy.
Statistically, bad things will happen, and they will happen to the average person. Therefore, I will do whatever I must to remove myself from the pool of the average. I can’t make my family invincible, but I can lower the odds of bad things happening.
