We can’t hide from statistics. They lie in wait for us everywhere. We can’t ignore them by repeating old saws such as “Figures don’t lie but liars can figure.” And eventually one statistic will make us all equal, namely that the death rate is 100 percent. So how do we use them to our advantage?
They, whoever they are, are always telling us we can beat the odds. For example, government bureaucrats inveigle us to play state-sponsored lotteries. If you think this is a good idea, read the book co-written by my brother: Selling Hope: State Lotteries in America, by Philip Cook and Charles Clotfelter. Sure, there are winners all the time, as pointed out by David J. Hand in The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day, but they won’t be you, and as a side note, winning large lotteries will ruin the lives of the winners.
One problem in trying to beat the odds is that you can’t predict which longshots will come in for you. My wife and I ran into our next-door neighbors at a line in London Heathrow Airport, and I ran into a member of the only University of Michigan NCAA championship basketball team, in California, while wearing a T-shirt commemorating that event. He rumbled “Nice shirt, and was gone before I could say anything.
Those coincidences would make David Hand yawn. Of course they happened. Or if they hadn’t happened to us, other coincidences would have. The problem is that of all the thousands of possible coincidences that could happen to us, we can’t predict which ones will.
In my mystery novel, Aces and Knaves, Karl Patterson, who may or may not be a compulsive gambler, depending on who you ask, knows all about statistics. He says, “Anything that can happen will happen eventually,” although he doesn’t necessarily apply this principle to his own life. He is shocked when he has an extended losing streak playing blackjack. Well, you wouldn’t think that Playboy founder Hugh Hefner could gammon a world champion backgammon player five games in a row, but he did.
Another of my brothers, Stephen, a mathematician, pointed out the fallacy in my father’s get-rich-slowly scheme. Dad’s idea was to bet low on an even bet, which, for example, can be found at a casino craps table. As long as you win you keep betting the same amount. If you lose, you keep doubling your bet until you win, which will make you even again. Stephen said that won’t work in the long run because you’ll either have to redouble your bet until you run out of money or you’ll exceed the house betting limit.
Okay, we’ve been talking about losing streaks (which could also be winning streaks), but remember that they don’t exist. Every roll of the dice, every hand dealt from a newly shuffled deck, every coin flip, is a new event, not connected to what happened before. If you flip an unbiased coin and it lands heads ten times in a row, the odds of getting heads on the next flip are still exactly 50 percent.
So what’s my point in all this rambling? Don’t try to beat the house, whether the house is a Las Vegas casino or a state lottery. And next time you run into your wife’s brother in Paris while you’re with your girlfriend, just smile and say, “I knew this was going to happen.”
