Philosophy of Mathspeaking topic
Even if two teams are perfectly equal in skill, over a long season it is nearly inevitable that one of them catches a much 'luckier' streak. A mediocre but lucky champion can be a pure product of statistics. Where is the line between skill and luck in success?
— large numbers and variance
practice with this topic
Set the timer (5-30 min), take 20 seconds of prep if you like, start talking. Jot your thoughts onto the sticky-note board.
similar topics
- A disease test is 99 percent accurate, and you just tested positive. Don't panic: if the disease is rare, the odds that you are actually sick may still be low. How can a 99 percent accurate test mislead you?
- Online, the 'most reviewed' restaurants collect both five stars and one star; the lukewarm stay silent. Why do the extremes speak while the average keeps quiet? Why is the world we see made only of edges?
- Why did the Pythagoreans' discovery of irrational numbers like the square root of 2 trigger a philosophical crisis, and why, according to legend, was it kept secret?
- If you could fold a piece of paper 42 times, its thickness would reach the Moon. All you do at each step is double it. Why does our intuition insist on picturing exponential growth as a straight line?
- There are infinitely many integers, and infinitely many even numbers. It feels like we threw half away, yet the two sets are exactly the same size. If half of something can be as big as the whole, what does 'half' even mean?