this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2026
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The meme is talking about a common probability error that surveys have shown even doctors are prone to making.

Why you're probably ok:

The rarity of the disease far exceeds the error rate of the positive test. Meaning, the disease occurs in 1 out of a million people, so if you are tested at random and show positive, you only have a 1 out of 30,000 chance (the 3% false-positive rate) of being the the 1 person who truly has the disease.

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[–] RollingZeppelin@piefed.ca 2 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

Yes, understood, ideally you would have two tests, one with high sensitivity to give some confidence that the disease is there, following by the high specificity test to compound the probability and rule out the false positive. Usually most tests have a trade off between specificity and sensitivity so two tests are needed.

Edit:
Watched the two videos, I love both these YouTubers but haven't seen either video before. The calculating of the Bayes factor as an update to the prior odds was very interesting, helped increase my understanding, thank you.