Monday, March 05, 2012
Cherry picking quiz…
From the Sloan thread, where we were discussing handicapping touts and cherry picking results…
Here is another MGL quiz:
Let’s say that you make 200 bets a year for 10 years and your “true” winning percentage is 50%. IOW, you flip 200 coins per year for 10 years. You publish your yearly results. Someone doesn’t like you and they want to make sure that everyone know that you are a loser. They decide to be (somewhat) truthful and publish some or all of your results. They decide to choose your results anywhere from “the last 3 years” to “all 10 years”. He doesn’t want to choose the last year or 2 years because everyone will say that that could be just a fluke.
What are the chances that he can find a subset of your results, limited to “last 3 years,” “last 4 years,” all the way to “last 10 years,” such that you are indeed a loser, despite being 50/50 (theoretically) in actuality?
What about if you have a true 52% probability of winning?
55%?
Same question, but the guy decides that he’ll use 1 or 2 years as well if he has to?
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