The article recommends watching the video by Matt Parker, and so do I. Great refresher on probability (or luck, if you will)
For convenience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ko3TdPy0TU
How Lucky Is Too Lucky in Minecraft?
11–20 of 98 posts
Re: How Lucky Is Too Lucky in Minecraft?
#12I wonder how kubernetes do.
Re: How Lucky Is Too Lucky in Minecraft?
#13I hate, immensely, how effective "double down and never admit guilt" is, but I don't think there's anything we can do about it as a society. Thank goodness most people don't have the guts to hold firm long enough to get away with it...
It's troubling when individuals do this, but I find it especially brutal that "double down and never admit guilt" is the go-to strategy for most nation states and corporations.
Re: How Lucky Is Too Lucky in Minecraft?
#14I hate, immensely, how effective "double down and never admit guilt" is, but I don't think there's anything we can do about it as a society. Thank goodness most people don't have the guts to hold firm long enough to get away with it...
That’s a pessimistic way to put it, but you have a point. This depends on the target audience though. Some people seem unable to be convinced by hard evidence and reason. If you’re able to pick your audience — which is the case for content creators and politicians — you will always be able to address those people. In most professional settings, you’re more dependent on the goodwill of someone specific, and I think th…
In this case it wasn't so much that Dream chose his audience, but that his audience is primarily impressionable young kids.
I looked through the Reddit threads that got posted around the time this happened and there were clearly a lot of young people who either chose to believe Dream because they didn't understand the statistics well enough to know it was BS, or were trying to rationalize that Dream was innocent based on some weird logic.
Re: How Lucky Is Too Lucky in Minecraft?
#15I hate, immensely, how effective "double down and never admit guilt" is, but I don't think there's anything we can do about it as a society. Thank goodness most people don't have the guts to hold firm long enough to get away with it...
It seems like this strategy didn't work so well in the past - do we know the reason why?
Perhaps politicians lying is business as usual, and it only seems to have increased because society gradually forgets things as they recede into history.
Just in the past the lie was "Iraq was behind 9/11 and has WMDs" or "The war in Vietnam is important to fight and easy to win"
Re: How Lucky Is Too Lucky in Minecraft?
#16I hate, immensely, how effective "double down and never admit guilt" is, but I don't think there's anything we can do about it as a society. Thank goodness most people don't have the guts to hold firm long enough to get away with it...
Deception can be planned or opportunistic.
In this case, Dream planned to deceive people by tweaking game randomness. It is impossible to justify when hundreds of people are following the rules.
This is why people double down. You mostly see apologies when opportunity got the best of judgement.
Re: How Lucky Is Too Lucky in Minecraft?
#17I'm not going to invest 40m watching the new video because I couldn't care less - but Dream hired a statistician to debunk the numbers in the first video.
I can believe he's cheating but I don't consider it probable. Dream's success doesn't come from record settings, so I don't think he has any incentive to cheat.
If anything, I believe more the allegations that his manhunt videos are staged, given that's the interesting content.
He makes money by creating long and entertaining videos (about modded Minecraft and his insane reflexes). This ticks off the YouTube algorithm which measures how much of a video viewers watch and how much time they watch a channel, contributing to exponential growth. On top of this, Minecraft fans are a niche that lives on YouTube.
Dream never became popular because of his speed records, he gained initial traction by creating content on PewDiePie (an infinitely more popular YouTuber). This is exploiting the YouTube's algorithm which recommends videos: by talking about someone famous you'll eventually end up being recommended to their huge user base.
Re: How Lucky Is Too Lucky in Minecraft?
#18I hate, immensely, how effective "double down and never admit guilt" is, but I don't think there's anything we can do about it as a society. Thank goodness most people don't have the guts to hold firm long enough to get away with it...
Seems like the only benefit to admitting guilt is for ones own conscience, but clearly that’s not enough for many.
There are great benefits for the society, and dare I say species.
Conscience, after all, is not an accident. Its a product of our evolution. We lived in small groups for most of our existence, and the very survival of the group was tied pretty directly to how well the group members worked together. Lying had consequences for a group that would not make lying have consequences for an individual.
The problems is that we now live in groups much larger than anything we experienced before.
Re: How Lucky Is Too Lucky in Minecraft?
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems like the only benefit to admitting guilt is for ones own conscience, but clearly that’s not enough for many.
our society is also not structured anymore to allowing one to admit guilt, and be absolved by some sort of community process after which you can return to a normal life; if you are guilty now you are forever cursed.
When was it structured that way? Serious question - I generally believe the same thing, but looking at it from the outside I’m finding it hard to reach a worthwhile example.
Re: How Lucky Is Too Lucky in Minecraft?
#20I'm not going to invest 40m watching the new video because I couldn't care less - but Dream hired a statistician to debunk the numbers in the first video. I can believe he's cheating but I don't consider it probable. Dream's success doesn't come from record settings, so I don't think he has any incentive to cheat. If anything, I believe more the allegations that his manhunt videos are staged, given that's the interes…
> I'm not going to invest 40m watching the new video because I couldn't care less
Going by the rest of your comment, you would've learned something.