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

I've not read this book. But from yokur citation of "the power law of
repeated successes" it sounds like a loser to me. Worse than a loser...
a source of infection that we really don't need.

In short... it sounds like it was written by a couple of very confused
people.

So who gave it "good reviews". OMU


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. 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 "

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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