r/AskStatistics • u/meb1111 • 1d ago
Would superstition decrease if people were more educated or knew more about statistics?
Coincidences stress me out, and I can't help getting superstitious about them sometimes, it's not even spiritual, it's psychological. But sometimes, after googling the things that happen to me, I find out that never going through that coincidence would be rarer than going through it. Would there be less superstituous people if they were more informed about statistics and data?
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u/SprinklesFresh5693 1d ago
Having a better understanding of stats would help everyone, but who knows if it would help superstition. I think being educated in science in general would reduce it. But you never know
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u/bigfootlive89 1d ago
That’s an inherently challenging counter factual to evaluate because in the real world the exposure of “learn statistics” isn’t entirely random. It’s like asking if more people wore helmets would there be less brain injuries. An easy error to make would be to 1) compute the risk of brain injuries among people engaging in sports; then 2) extrapolate to the general population. You’d vastly overestimate the benefit of wearing a helmet because the general population doesn’t have that same baseline risk. So likewise, the number of people who study stats is very small and self selecting, so we don’t have a strong analytical framework to answer the question.
Or I could just say yeah, intuitively, more education in general helps people understand how the world works and will reduce superstitions biases.
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u/delsystem32exe 1d ago
i use statistics like bernoulli trial, decision tree, expected value to prove my superstitions
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u/kronos23456777777 1d ago
I like this saying: You cannot reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.
I think it applies quite broadly to many areas. To answer your specific question, most people who are superstitious did not start believing because of some evidence based critical thinking. So, it is quite unlikely that they will discard that belief because of some statistical thinking.
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u/random__forest 20h ago
This question reminded me of a famous anecdote about Niels Bohr, in which a visitor noticed a horseshoe above Bohr's house door and asked how such a renowned physicist could believe in such nonsense. Bohr replied, “Of course I don't believe in it, but I was told it brings luck whether you believe in it or not.”
I guess that's the answer, lol.
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u/ElectroMagnetsYo 1d ago
I think an uncritical mind learning the fact that the breadth of human knowledge is largely just a model rather than reflective of some objective “Truth” (regardless of whether Objective Truth even exists, but that’s a discussion for r/philosophy) would only lead to further conspiratorial thinking and delusions rather than squashing them.
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u/NewSchoolBoxer 1d ago
No. Gambling has been part of human civilization for thousands of years. Half of all gambling profits are from addicts. There's Gambler's Fallacy, Sunk Cost Fallacy, Chasing the Dragon's Tail, etc. I go to a casino once every few years with money I intend to use but then I'm not the target demographic.
You'll never convince these people of i.i.d. random variables or the more they gamble, the more they will definitely lose. You and I also don't understand the thrill of betting on a team that wins a game you enjoy watching. 5% house edge be damned. Could also discuss teenagers illegally gambling on CS:GO skins with streamers who tell them to.
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u/Novel_Arugula6548 1d ago
No because philosophy is a never ending debate and there is disagreement over the right kind of probability theory in the first place (frequentist vs bayesian).
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u/CaptainFoyle 1d ago
Maybe? But what can you do about it? force feed them knowledge? If they were interested in the statistics, they probably wouldn't be superstitious in the first place (or at least less). And if they aren't interested, it'll be difficult to change that
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u/othybear 20h ago
I’ve been a statistician for almost 20 years. I still tell my dnd dice to roll low when I’m rolling for fun to get the “bad roll out of the way” so my good rolls are saved for important skill checks.
I think superstition is a part of human nature and will always be present, even among folks who know about statistics.
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u/cheesecakegood BS (statistics) 14h ago
Sort of. But not all topics are created equal. I think something more closely related to your point would be eg this https://improbability-principle.com/the-laws-of-the-improbability-principle/
There’s a dude who wrote a whole book on why improbable-seeming things and “coincidences” are actually relatively common, and the link calls out 5 concepts that come together to make it seem that way!
But more to your point, consider that some superstitions play a functional emotional role for people. But also, and even more critically, humans have leveraged noticing weird patterns into amazing survival strategies, novel research directions, and folk wisdom over the years, so the risk of false positives is just part of the package too. Humans are built to notice coincidences because they sometimes aren’t! It’s not surprising at all.
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u/Efficient-Tie-1414 1d ago
Some of the students in a probability course seemed a bit surprised when I explained that in a game of purely chance that the expected return is negative, so eventually players will have no money and the organiser will have their money.
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u/ProofLeast9846 1d ago
No haha