Hacker News Reader

Comment by stared | Hacker News Reader

It is generally a good mental tool.

Yet, without explicitly saying it's about (base-10) logarithms, it is preaching to the choir - either you already know that, or won't learn either.

Pet peeve - while most numbers make sense, this not, by a quite a large number:

> -10 practically impossible, every atom in your body quantum tunneling simultaneously one foot to the left

I don't want to do maths here, but for a single particle to happen that, it would be a totally different scale (I don't know, maybe closer to -10^10^10).

View on HN

Yeah I'm not too sure what they should be but the lower probabilities are way off.

For -9 it lists 'shuffling a deck and getting cards in perfect sequential order', which is closer to -68. Also being dealt a royal straight flush is more like 10^-6 unless you get more than 5 cards.

Not that I don't understand why, low probabilities are very tricky to get a grip on. And 'winning the lottery' sounds a lot more likely to people than it should, while having the exact same birthday as someone at work is a lot more likely than you might think.

Great catch! I'll fix those rows later today

Any suggestions for stuff I can put in the probability rows?

I think the problem is that below 10^-6 there's a pretty broad range of magnitudes that are effectively 'happens to n people every k years (if they try very hard)'. Which makes them rare but not impossible, which is annoying because you can't rule it out but you can't expect to easily reproduce it either.

That does tend to be the best way to think about those probabilities. For any probability you can make it happen If you try enough times or with enough people you can try to force it to happen. Below -6 is a pretty wide range of stuff you can just barely make happen if you have enough people, enough tries and enough time.

It's only once you get to the 'wouldn't happen to 10^10 people in a million years' that you get to the stuff that you can be fairly sure has never happened. Matt Parker has quite a good video on it [1]. He settles on 10^-19 as something that you can be fairly sure has never happened (deliberately).

As for other stuff in the probability rows, maybe include a couple of well known paradoxes like the birthday paradox. And be clear what you're saying, things like getting dealt a royal flush depends a lot on the type of poker game.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ko3TdPy0TU

>Not that I don't understand why, low probabilities are very tricky to get a grip on.

They are harder to intuitively guess maybe, but it's still trivial to verify. I don't understand why the article would have so many mistakes, unless either the author just chose whatever numbers felt right (but then why write them down as a reference?) or just used chatGPT.

Agree that having something in there for how to use it will make it make sense for 10^1 times more people. Show one simple calculation. I don't know: Probability that at least one person on Earth gets struck by lighting twice in a year.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com