Wisedigs

Probability gives ridiculous people the opportunity to reduce events to numbers, then translate these numbers into laws and regulations.

Ever since I started thinking about probability I haven’t been able to get one sentence out of my head: this is flawed. The math behind probability is fun, easy to grasp if you have the right teacher, but is probability practical? Is it something that can be used to dictate the lives of people?

Examine this sentence: the chance of surviving a car crash improves by 30% when wearing a seatbelt. Let’s say the chance of surviving a car crash while wearing a seatbelt is 80%, that means 20% of the time I would not survive if I was in an accident. What’s wrong with what I just said? When speaking to a stats professor, he will explain to you it is not sufficient for you to flip a coin 10 or 20 or even 30 times to get that 50% probability figure. You must flip it a thousand times or more until you can be sure you have determined the correct probability of heads or tails for that coin.

Let’s apply that logic to surviving an accident. How many accidents am I going to be in throughout my entire life? What if that 20% of the time happens to be my first 10 accidents? (That’s a bit ridiculous given it is the chance of NOT surviving, but let’s stick with it just to see how ridiculous this is.) Now we have a problem. Unlike a coin, I don’t have the luxury of experiencing both outcomes indefinitely. This implies that given any accident I am in I may either survive, or I may not. It does not matter if it was a 90% chance of survival! As long as both outcomes are possible and can occur under reasonable circumstances (not 100%+/-0.0001%), what difference does it make to the one who just stepped outside their house that its 60-40, or 90-10?

There are obvious advantages to wearing seatbelts, especially for those with poor motor skills such as toddlers and young children. Seatbelts also provide peace of mind and a false sense of security. Making seatbelts mandatory on adult drivers? Airbags, for example, are another safety mechanism we find in vehicles. The harsh reality is, if the Canadian government truly cared about the safety of the public and their well-being and truly believed that airbags protect people’s lives, cars that are not equipped with airbags would have been banned from the streets long ago. How expensive would that be? Exactly my point. It is not about our safety, not out of concern for us, it is simply a way for them to shift the blame and shift responsibility. It all boils down to one thing: dollars and cents.

Probability isn’t Apple, it is safe to handle. But, as with anything taken for granted, we must be critical of it. It’s nice to be able to attach a number to anything, numbers are easy to understand, easy to manipulate. Numbers make nice pie charts and fancy curves. Putting your trust in numbers is like putting your trust in a piece of metal or cloth. It all amounts to nothing.