Yikes. These data jerked me right back to the first lab of my genetics course, where we learn basic principles of probability with exercises in coin flipping and dice rolling.
More Americans incorrectly say that the likelihood of flipping two coins and getting two heads is 50% than correctly say it’s 25%
I never even thought to ask them if they had a different, incorrect assumption about probability, we just did ‘experiments’ to see what the results were (and also learned some simple statistics and calculations). I am confident that if my students were asked this question they’d say 25% with no hesitation…although they might also go on a bit about chance variation and bell curve distributions.
Although the ignorance on display in that chart might explain a different phenomenon: US gambling addiction is ‘out of control’ as betting markets boom, policy expert warns. Yeah. I swear that almost half the ads I see online are about betting.
Prediction market platforms – where users can bet on everything fromaward winners and war developments, to what someone might wear, or what an artist will sing on stage – have meanwhile surged in popularity in the last few years, with more than $1bn traded on Kalshi during Super Bowl Sunday alone.
Prediction market platforms contend that they are not gambling platforms, but rather financial trading platforms. Critics argue they are gambling under another name.
It’s gambling.
It’s preying on stupid people. That chart says that that’s about 48% of the US adult population, so I can see how it’s lucrative.
Wait. I just noticed the footnote on the chart: “Responses of ‘0%’, ‘75%’, ‘100%’, and ‘something else’ are not shown”. I assume that’s the difference between the frequency of responses shown and 100%, but I want to know how deep the ignorance runs.
Wow — seems like working out how that conclusion is wrong wouldn’t take too much analytic depth.
And the surging prominence of the mant variations of e-casinos would be a subject for our 🥸 so-effective politicians to address, but, well ….
I suspect that the problem isn’t so much misunderstanding statistics, as that a lot of the people who got it wrong didn’t take the time to understand what the actual question was.
I see this all the time. People who are capable of doing the mechanical part of solving a mathematics problem out of a textbook, go all to pieces when you ask them to take a problem stated in words and use it to set up the problem in mathematical terms in the first place.
As Bayesian priors go, 50% isn’t the worst-case answer. It shouldn’t take many more events to nudge it over to 25%.
I inherited a coin collection from my aunt that was started by my grandfather. While going through some boxes of miscellaneous unsorted coins I came across a two-headed 1964 Kennedy half dollar. It’s obviously been manufactured from 2 coins because whoever made it neglected to file off the sharp burr where he inserted the cut-down coin into the hollowed out one. I was able to fool my grandkids for a minute or so, until the oldest one asked to look at it.
I wonder how many claimed their answer was based on their own independent research, instead of taking the word of Big Probability.