RE: Mastropaolo's probabilities are science.

Pim van Meurs (entheta@eskimo.com)
Tue, 13 Oct 1998 09:18:48 -0700

Thanks Kevin, you are right in pointing out the differences in 0.95 and Joseph's probability argument.

The following scenario:

I throw a die 10 times:

6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6

What is the probability of this happening ? (1/6)^10

And despite being much smaller than 0.95 it did happen

What is the likelyhood that the die is 'loaded' ?

Now that is a hypothesis which can be addressed

H0: The observation was due to chance

H1: The observation was not due to chance

Now one can use statistics to determine the likelyhood of H0 versus H1 and often 0.90, 0.95 or 0.99 are used as limits on 'chance' playing a role here.

But even at a 0.95 limit there is a 1 in 20 chance that the observation was due to chance.