Preface: I've only been to Vegas once (a year and a half ago), and I was not yet old enough to gamble, so I really don't have any lessons I learned there.
Today in statistics class we were talking about probability, and how you can increase your chances of winning at certain games. Like the goat problem, which has been discussed in NUMB3RS
and 21.
We then talked about taking samples and finding the probability of an occurrence and me being the great student I am decided to think of an example for myself. Since for the first lecture of the class one of the problems was discussing the distribution male vs. females views of kissing on the first date, I decided to keep with the topic of dating (a common one at BYU).
I decided to calculate the probability of being asked to go on a date on Friday or Saturday. (Since that is only days of the week I've been asked out on a date and I wanted to decrease my sample size so I would hopefully have a higher probability). For my sample I took data from Fridays and Saturdays from the last 2 years so that is a total of 208 days. I then took the number of dates I've been asked on for the past 2 years and divided it by my sample and what did I get....1.4% probability.
Today's lesson- A stupid person (going against probability or statistics) on a game show has a higher probability(23.6x higher) to win car playing the goat game, than I do of going on a date this weekend. It's stupid to bet in Vegas and even worse to bet on my dating life.
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