This reminds me of a conversation from Dumb and Dumber.
Lloyd: What are the chances of a guy like you and a girl like me… ending up together?
Mary: Well, that’s pretty difficult to say.
Lloyd: Hit me with it! I’ve come a long way to see you, Mary. The least you can do is level with me. What are my chances?
Mary: Not good.
Lloyd: You mean, not good like one out of a hundred?
Mary: I’d say more like one out of a million.
[pause]
Lloyd: So you’re telling me there’s a chance.
However: apply 1:1E6 to 260E6 million people in the US in 1994, there’s probably 130 couples like them.
Far from the “still not happening even if you flip a (weighted) coin every second since the big bang”- chance in the post, but since Lloyd probably did not do the math and just ignored the actual value… yep, classical example.
In practice, when people say “one in a million” in that kind of context, it’s much higher than that. I haven’t watched Dumb and Dumber, but I’d be surprised if Lloyd did not, actually, have a decent chance of ending together with Mary.
On one hand, we claim [dumb stuff using made up impossible numbers](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GrtbTAPfkJa4D6jjH/confidence-levels-inside-and-outside-an-argument) and on the other hand, we dismiss those numbers and fall back on there’s-a-chancism. These two phenomena don’t always perfectly compensate one another (as examples show in both posts), but common sense is more reliable that it may seem at first. (I’m not saying it’s the correct approach nonetheless.)
This reminds me of a conversation from Dumb and Dumber.
Lloyd: What are the chances of a guy like you and a girl like me… ending up together? Mary: Well, that’s pretty difficult to say. Lloyd: Hit me with it! I’ve come a long way to see you, Mary. The least you can do is level with me. What are my chances? Mary: Not good. Lloyd: You mean, not good like one out of a hundred? Mary: I’d say more like one out of a million. [pause] Lloyd: So you’re telling me there’s a chance.
Good post.
However: apply 1:1E6 to 260E6 million people in the US in 1994, there’s probably 130 couples like them.
Far from the “still not happening even if you flip a (weighted) coin every second since the big bang”- chance in the post, but since Lloyd probably did not do the math and just ignored the actual value… yep, classical example.
In practice, when people say “one in a million” in that kind of context, it’s much higher than that. I haven’t watched Dumb and Dumber, but I’d be surprised if Lloyd did not, actually, have a decent chance of ending together with Mary.
On one hand, we claim [dumb stuff using made up impossible numbers](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GrtbTAPfkJa4D6jjH/confidence-levels-inside-and-outside-an-argument) and on the other hand, we dismiss those numbers and fall back on there’s-a-chancism.
These two phenomena don’t always perfectly compensate one another (as examples show in both posts), but common sense is more reliable that it may seem at first. (I’m not saying it’s the correct approach nonetheless.)