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General community for all things mathematics on @lemmy.world

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Is there statistical credibility to the idea that any one rare experience is unlikely to happen to any one person, but at least one rare experience is likely to happen to each person? (kbin.social)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/math

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I’m picturing the math as a very large set of bell curves where most people fall somewhere in the middle, but each person is likely to be an outlier on at least one.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Lay definitions of "rare" or "unlikely" tend to break down on this type of question.

If you've ever played chess, you've had an experience that's entirely unique to you. In almost all cases, that exact game you played with the color you played in it has never in the history of the world happened to any other person. That's a rare experience. So as phrased, the answer to your question is yes.

The underlying question could be more accurately phrased as "at least one rare experience that would be categorized by a human's brain as a salient and simple experience indicative of further analysis to discern an underlying pattern where in fact none exists, and it's just statistical noise," but that's not a mathematical enough question to be analyzable within the confines of pure statistics.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

I see, and I suppose if you index it by place/time it’s even more obvious that people are always experiencing unique things in a way so it’s true but kind of vacuous?