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Sep 16·edited Sep 16

The Royal Statistical Society's "Statistics and Law" section will be discussing statistical issues in the Lucy Letby case on Thursday afternoon at a closed meeting in London, where I'll be giving a presentation. I'll be in London on Wednesday and Thursday if anyone wants a chat with me. https://statslaw.wordpress.com/

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Jabbing babies with unknown foreign substances is another plausible explanation but strangely never really mentioned.

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Pen&paper RPGS, card games, tabletop games and such are wonderful for a basic understanding of probability.

Not only do you get to see things like seven '1's rolled in a row on a 20-sided die, you also get to see someone tossing seven '1's at the same time, when tossing seven dies. Sounds extreme, until you put it into the perspective of all the rolls and tosses made during a game, and then into the perspective of all the games in a month, a year, and your whole gaming career.

Upon which one realises, without actually doing any math, that those seven '1's weren't that odd an occurrence, viewed purely probability-wise.

But since games take place in some kind of context where different statistically probable rolls effect and affect events in the game, the odd thing happening has a huge (or even yuge) impact.

I have to wonder what the overlap of Warhammer-players and people not buying statistical fudging is? I mean, WH40k and WFB players calculate stuff like "30 attacks, +4 to hit, +3 to wound, vs +3 saves" - is that better than "20 attacks, +3 to hit, +4 to wound, vs no save" in their heads in split seconds.

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This problem is not new. Read John 9:2 "who sinned that this child was born blind?". The rabbi is forced to reject the framing. "Nobody" is his answer.

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Thank you for a delightfully straightforward explanation of the topic. Which I was able to follow 😂

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