Showerthoughts

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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 most popular seem to be lighthearted, clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts: 1

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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 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/showerthoughts

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

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 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.