Sorting NaNs

Steven D'Aprano steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info
Fri Jun 8 20:11:02 EDT 2018


On Fri, 08 Jun 2018 17:45:58 +0000, Peter Pearson wrote:

> What bothered me was my feeling that a "reasonable observer"
> would expect the random-float population to be much larger than 2**32,
> and the probably-collision-free sample size to be accordingly much
> larger than 2**16, which is, after all, small enough to appear in many
> applications.

People's intuition about probability is crap. Hence the Birthday Paradox 
I already linked to, and the Monty Hall Problem, which you can google 
for, and the Prosecutor's Fallacy:

http://www.conceptstew.co.uk/pages/prosecutors_fallacy.html

which sometimes (often?) leads to real miscarriages of justice:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Clark




-- 
Steven D'Aprano
"Ever since I learned about confirmation bias, I've been seeing
it everywhere." -- Jon Ronson




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