this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2025
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Would You Rather

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Welcome to c/WouldYouRather, where we present you with the toughest, most ridiculous choices you never knew you had to make! Would you rather have a third arm that's only useful for picking your nose, or be able to talk to animals but only if they're wearing hats? Yeah, it's that kind of vibe. Come for the absurdity, stay because you've clearly got nothing better to do with your life.

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submitted 5 days ago by SnokenKeekaGuard@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/wouldyourather@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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[โ€“] silasmariner@programming.dev 6 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

It's not P(E) x 1825 that makes no sense because the probabilities are independent. It's 1 - (1 - P(E))^1825 -- your maths would imply that a 1/1000 chance had a 100% probability of happening after 1000 attempts, which is not how independent probabilities work.

Anyway I'd probably go for it if it were, like, 1/100,000, giving a probability of the bad thing happening once over 5 years at just under 2%

[โ€“] silasmariner@programming.dev 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I just remembered I hadn't tried to write anything in J for like a year so I had a go at seeing how far the approximation was from the real values and got:

(-.@^&1825@-. % *&1825)@(0.1&^)"0 i. 10
0.000547945 0.00547945 0.0547945 0.459687 0.914098 0.990935 0.999089 0.999909 0.999991 0.999999

So it looks like the ratio probably converges as you increase n (these results are for 1, 1/10, 1/100 etc) but that x 1825 is always higher and starts off wildly off. But these numbers are probably mad squiffy because floating point yadda yadda.

Edit again: oh yeah. Binomial expansion. Once the negation of your probability gets very close to 1 the initial coefficient will absolutely dominate. Proof left for reader.