this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2024
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Science Memes

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50% survival rate (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

Nope.

  • gambler's fallacy
  • 50 is 50
  • gambler's fallacy

Gambler's fallacy goes both ways. Just because the last 20 were successful doesn't mean the actual success rate is higher.

EDIT: Or you might actually be right and whoever made this is wrong.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Gamblers fallacy does go both ways. There's also a thing in gambling, not part of the gamblers fallacy, more of a superstition thing, that there can be runs of, what is more or less luck. The gamblers fallacy would have you believe that after 20 successes, a failure is "due to happen". According to math, that's not the case, and in the event of something that requires skill to execute, almost nothing is just luck or statistics.

So the last one isn't so much the gamblers fallacy, if anything it would be the superstition that the run of successes will continue; however scientists will look at this more as a game of skill. While 50% of all patients who have the procedure do not survive, or whatever, the last 20 of this doctors patients have survived. Clearly their skill for the procedure is above average. Even from a statistics perspective the rate might be 50% but you're in the hands of a doctor pushing that number up to 50%, rather than dragging it down to 50%. So on all fronts, if you hear this, bluntly, you have an unknown risk level, somewhere between 50% and 0%.