Read the following essay, which lacks a conclusion:
Most people are very bad at understanding probability, which is the chance of something happening, or of one event being related to another. That’s why so many of us are more scared of flying than of driving or think vaccines cause autism. When “the odds” involve many possibilities, our hunches about how the world is supposed to work are generally wrong.
If you’ve taken a statistics class, your teacher has probably proved this to you with The Birthday Problem. If you are in a class of twenty-five people, what do you think the chances are that two of them have the same birthday? Most of us would guess it there’s a really small probability, but actually, there’s a greater than 50:50 chance. We think the odds are low because on our own, we rarely meet someone with our birthday. We don’t consider that each of twenty-five people all checking with each of the other twenty-four people makes the coincidence of at least one shared birthday many times more likely.
Which of the options below is the most effective conclusion to the essay?
Let’s do the math. If there are twenty-four people in the room with you, you have twenty-four chances to find someone who shares your birthday. Not likely. But if everyone else checks dates with the other twenty-four people, that is three hundred chances for a match! Pretty likely.
In one of the Star Wars movies, Han Solo snaps, “Never tell me the odds!” This line is usually thought to mean that you shouldn’t give up even if it seems your chances are small. But maybe it only goes to show that Commander Solo should have taken more math classes.
The point is, most people don’t understand that probability isn’t just what happens to you but what happens to everyone. The Birthday Problem proves that few people understand the odds. In conclusion, think about that the next time you buy a lottery ticket.
Statistics are often used to convince people that something that feels right or matches their instincts is true. But as the Birthday Problem shows, the probability of something happening is frequently not what we imagine it to be. Events and coincidences are often much more likely to occur than we expect.