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by freyir 1897 days ago
It’s not the gambler’s fallacy since they’re treating each flight as an independent event:

Probability of dying on one flight: 1/10,000,000

Probability of surviving one flight: 1-1/10,000,000 = 9,999,999/10,000,000

Probability of surviving 100 flights: (9,999,999/10,000,000)^100

Probability of not surviving 100 flights: 1-(9,999,999/10,000,000)^100 ~ 1/100,000.

I don’t know if the initial assumption of 1/10,000,000 survival rate is accurate, but the math is correct.

And when you have a probability that’s very small, you can skip all that and approximate by multiplying the probability by the number of events: 1/10,000,000 * 100 = 1/100,000. That’s thanks to the binomial approximation.