Showerthoughts

29665 readers

1090 users here now

A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.

Rules

All posts must be showerthoughts
The entire showerthought must be in the title
Avoid politics (NEW RULE as of 5 Nov 2024, trying it out)
Posts must be original/unique
Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

691

With two Boeing whistleblowers dead in one month, either Boeing is actively killing them, or there are enough whistleblowers that this rate of death is not statistically significant (feddit.nl)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

86 comments fedilink hide all child comments

...and I don't know which possibility is the least worrying

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

The probability of 2 people having the same birthday is 1 in 365 because it's the same as picking person A's birthday as a specific day in the year and checking whether person B has their birthday on that date.

Now, the reason the number is so low is that you are basically comparing pairs and with 23 people there are 253 different pairings (23 choose 2 or 22*23/2). With each pair having a 1/365 chance to have the same birthday and having 253 distinct pairs, you would have to fail a 1/365 check 253 times in a row. The formula you can use for the success rate is 1 - (1-p)^x with p being the probability and x the number of trials, so in this case

1 - (1 - 1/365)^253 = 0.5004

In essence, the unintuitive part of the "paradox" is how fast the number of possible pairs grows the more people you add.