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The difference betwen skill and luck.

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Re: The difference betwen skill and luck.

#41
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No dude- you were right and he was wrong.

No, he's saying that if you have a few outliers to begin with you expect to get more normal-looking data later on, drowning your outliers in them. If you get 5 heads initially and then another 5 heads and 5 tails, it's still closer to the mean than when you began.

That can't be right, since the each point in the data is independent. In a 50/50 coin-flip game where you get 9 coins come up heads, the probability that the next coin flip results in tails is still 50%. What you need to understand is that probability deals with uncertain events. So instead of thinking about the final count needing to be around 50% heads and 50% tails, you should expect the count of the yet undecided part to converge around 50% heads, 50% tails.

Re: The difference betwen skill and luck.

#42
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, he's saying that if you have a few outliers to begin with you expect to get more normal-looking data later on, drowning your outliers in them. If you get 5 heads initially and then another 5 heads and 5 tails, it's still closer to the mean than when you began.

That can't be right, since the each point in the data is independent. In a 50/50 coin-flip game where you get 9 coins come up heads, the probability that the next coin flip results in tails is still 50%. What you need to understand is that probability deals with uncertain events. So instead of thinking about the final count needing to be around 50% heads and 50% tails, you should expect the count of the yet undecided…

I just noticed this thread continued, but I'm not sure what you're worried about. The two things you said:

* the final count will be about 50/50

* the remaining part will be about 50/50

are actually the same thing (since we're talking about a limit). That is, we could flip a fair coin a billion times, get all heads, and still, in the long run, expect the total ratio to converge to 1/2 (imagine flipping the coin forever - that initial billion flips won't even be a blip on the graph).

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