Chapter 9. The Law of Large Numbers
A 2002 article, “The Odds of That,” in the New York Times Sunday Magazine caused quite a stir. Author Lisa Belkin said that people are always finding conspiracies or supernatural coincidences where they may not exist. She quoted Stanford statistician Persi Dianconis, who pointed out that, given the fact that there are 290 million people in the U.S., 290 times a day a one-in-a-million shot will occur. Belkin's article resulted in our receiving phone calls from friends and associates across the country asking, “Isn't that what you guys have always said?”
Well, yes, we have. But we didn't discover this. Neither did Dianconis, nor did Belkin. The Law of Large Numbers has been around for a long time. We learned it ...
Get Future Think: How to Think Clearly in a Time of Change now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
