Submitted by Chris Parsons on December 23, 2009 - 3:23pm.
We're both hitting on the law of averages - I was generalizing towards the ignorance of the concept in general, and you're referring to the misinterpretation of the law itself, as the law of average states that a random variable will "tend" towards the mean, it may not (and fairly often will not) ever reach the mean. In either situation, I completely agree with you.
With that being said, for n=2000, to have won only 880 deals... you're nearly 5 standard deviations from the mean if the math in my head is right. At that point, you're going to be counting the 9s on how unlucky that is. That's a horrible, horrible anomaly to have.
I think we're trying to say the same thing in different ways
We're both hitting on the law of averages - I was generalizing towards the ignorance of the concept in general, and you're referring to the misinterpretation of the law itself, as the law of average states that a random variable will "tend" towards the mean, it may not (and fairly often will not) ever reach the mean. In either situation, I completely agree with you.
With that being said, for n=2000, to have won only 880 deals... you're nearly 5 standard deviations from the mean if the math in my head is right. At that point, you're going to be counting the 9s on how unlucky that is. That's a horrible, horrible anomaly to have.