Re: Power Law of Probability? (The book "Chances Are" by the Kaplans)


W. Watson wrote:
I'm reading "Chances Are ... Adventures in Probability" by Kaplan and
Kaplan. It's an interesting book for its background, philosphy and history
of probability. It is not a text book. Their background is in the
humanities. The book is meant for the general reader, and has gotten good
reviews.

REALLY? by whom?

Of course I've not read the book, but judging from your couple
paragraphs,
it's enough of a Horror Story to give it a rating of THUMBS DOWN (as
many thumbs as their are in humanity! :-)).


I wonder about how the general reader fares in some instances.
Equations appear on only about 5 to 10% (if even that high) of the pages.

They mention the power law of repeated successes as (1/6)*(1/6) of the
number of repeated successes. Fine. Later they mention, page 33, "if
something can happen with probabilty a and not happen with probability b in
each of x trials, then we can say, putting the power law into general terms,
that the chance of this not happening at every trial is:
b**x/(a+b)**x "

That's a most curious and contorted way of first mislabeling a
probabity
RULE on independent events as "power law" and then give that
expression for b raised to the power x, where b is the probability of
the complement of a, and x is the number of trials.

The rest is incomprehensible gibberish.

-- Reef Fish Bob.


They then go on to equate this to 1/2 to find the number of trials it will
take to produce a fair outcome. They invoke logs and series expansions, and
finally 0.7 provides a multiplier to odds in any game that will tell you the
number of expected trials. (in dice, 35*0.7 = 24.5 trials) Well, fine. For a
general audience, this seems quite a bit of math juggling. Has anyone read
this book and wants to comment on this?



Wayne T. Watson (Watson Adventures, Prop., Nevada City, CA)
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