Can't believe nobody has linked the relevant xkcd yet
this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2024
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Which of course is why people referred to points when discussing stocks/markets. Got to love an unambiguous term.
Funny thing is this is a language issue, not a math issue.
Why not both?
I've always thought of math as a language and I talk to my kids about it that way too. Math is an other way to describe the world.
It's very different from spoken languages and translating between the two needs to be learned and practiced.
Our math education doesn't include enough word problems and it should be bi-directional. In addition to teaching students how to write equations based of sentences we should teach them how to describe what's going on in an equation.
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Wrong: I had a 1% chance, and I doubled my chances. Now my chances are 101%.
Right: I had a 1% chance, and I doubled my chances. Now my chances are 2%.
Wrighongt: I had a 1% chance, and I doubled my chances. Now my chances are 3%, because I'm a lucky person.
Sleep deprived fraction lover: I had a 1% chance, and I doubled my chances. Now due to 1/100 * 1/100 I chances are 0.0001%.
Why lying with maths is so easy, the average person, even in developed countries is practically innumerate (massive hyperbole, but the fact lying with numbers is easy, still stands)
Having two possible outcomes does not mean it's a 50:50 chance.
"So if I aim the arrow at the 1cm square from 100m away and shoot, I either hit it or I don't. So basically I have a 50% chance of hitting it."
My wife, father-in-law and I were playing a board game with my brother-in-law. In this game, we were playing as detectives who have to try to find his character, but each turn he could move in secret in one of several directions. We were a few turns in at one point and he could have been in any of dozens of places at this point. We drove him nuts by saying "he's either in this spot or he's not, it's a 50-50 chance." He kept arguing "I could be in a ton of places! It's not a 50-50 chance!" But we just kept pretending we didn't understand and arguing that there were only two possibilities, he's there or he's not, so it was clearly a 50-50 chance. He got quite angry.
Scotland Yard or Letters from Whitechapel?
I love Scotland Yard. We got it for a friend who loves detective stories. Then discovered that it’s a public transit simulator which is even better.
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Either I become president, or I don't.
Therefore, the odds of me becoming president is 50%
Brb committing 34 felonies.
You've already failed.
You have to commit hundreds of felonies. In broad daylight. And brag about it.
Threaten witnesses. Delay everything.
And only be convicted of 34.
Then not get sentenced.
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That's not even a stat question, it is a english question. It is an increase by 80% not to 80%
Statistics only come to play to figure out our new chances.
Maybe I'm wrong but by writing "increase by 80%" there is ambiguity you don't get if you instead spelled out:
- Increase by 80 percent
- Increase by 80 percentage points
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Or "by 80 percentage points"
"By 80 percentage points" means add 80 more points to a number of percentage points, so 5% becomes 85%. "By 80 percent" means add 80 percent of the current value.
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It's really pretty simple - if something increases by 80%, you add 80% of whatever it already is... one dollar becomes $1.80... one percent becomes 1.8 percent.
Most people don't understand it because they've seen it done wrong so often, the wrong way seems right.
I'm quite willing to bet that 70% of the population has no clue that percentages, fractions, and decimals are the same thing.
Then odds show up to the party and upend everything we thought we understood.
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In the same vein, if the volume on your phone is on 1, and you increase it to 2, it has increased by 100%
Kinda. Logarithms are weird
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In game design, it has to be stated whether it’s multiplicative or additive. Sometimes a logarithmic function is used as well, with increases in efficiency as 1 / ( 1 + bonus ). This allows you to always add more bonus, but there’s diminishing returns.
i wish it was more common to also indicate the precedence of a percentage increase, so that it’s easier to know if i’m dealing with (x + y ) * z or x + (y * z). although that’s admittedly a lot harder to communicate.
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I play video games; I need to know if the percentage is additive or multiplicative.
"+100%" looks pretty good until you see what "×25%" actually gives you.
×25% gives you 1/4 the original value, whereas +100% is double the original value, let's say 8/4 to keep it consistent. ×125% (in case a 1 is missing) is still only 5/4 the original value.
Is there a typo in your comment?
In video games they commonly use that to mean they are multiplying by 25. We know it's not correct in stats. This is why game wikis commonly put the actual formula for things rather than the tooltip the developers wrote.
Biggest lie in a game's tooltip/description of an item was how the formula for Armor Piercing rounds in Fallout 1 and 2 was bad, so instead of being stronger than regular rounds, they were weaker.
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I've always wondered how to disambiguate multiplication and addition of percentages. I guess that's what percentage points are for?
10% of your people vote for a party.
The votes increase by 10% => now 11%
The votes increase by 200% => now 30%
The votes increased by 50 percent points => now 60%
The annoying part is that there is no well-known notation for showing percentage points, so people use % for both percentages and percentage points.
In deep rock galactic survival, the color of the number is different for percentage and percentage points
We really should just have a different symbol tho. Maybe we do, I'm not a math wiz, but we certainly don't have a broadly used one.
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I know all this. I play DPS!
When my son was about to be born my mother in law caught wind that we didn't plan on circumcising (before researching it I mostly felt it was just strange to do cosmetic surgery on a newborn) but her argument was mostly parroting the 50% reduction in this that and the other disease, missing the fact that it was going from a 0.5% chance to a 0.25% chance, but of course introduced new risks by nature of being a surgery.
Naturally after looking more into it I learned just how bonkers circumcision is so I was far more cemented in my position
The fact that it is even allowed in so-called civilized countries is outrageous. In the US it common because some religious nut was obsessed with children's masturbation.
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I work in a place full of statisticians, and we've had to unfortunately have numerous conversations with some of them about the difference between "a decrease" and "a decrease in the rate." Apparently "it's increasing slower" isn't clear enough for some.
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well it's ambiguous. Its also a sloppy way of expressing an increase by 80 percentage points.
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So you're telling me there's a chance?
Dark Souls cleared this up for me real quick.
Even more confusing when you hear that the odds of catching a disease have increased by a %. In many ways odds can be more intuitive, but we're so used to working with simple probability that it's a total nightmare to wrap your head around at first.
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