[unphased]

This article started off really clear and straightforward, then it dove into stuff that I clearly wasn't going to be able to follow, and upon skipping it I arrived at the explanation which was was plainly obvious from common sense.

[Rioghasarig]

Well that's what mathematicians like to do.

[minihat]

>such a number is often dutifully provided to such journalists, who in turn report it as some sort of quantitative demonstration of how remarkable the event was.

Apparently the conclusions are not common sense if you are a journalist.

[andreareina]

Common sense can mislead, so it's instructive to make it rigorous to see whether it does indeed hold up. Not for everything or even most things, otherwise you'd be analysis paralysis sets in.

[jiggywiggy]

In this case the author was a bit silly.

He also used common sense to determine he had no way of determining the probability of a rigged event. And therefore using Bayesian probability looked fancy but didn't help learn anything new. I remember reading first paragraph and thinking wow, bayesian has a way of helping determining the odds of that, but no.

Either he wanted to educate or is so involved with statistics that it became his default way of framing problems.

[lupire]

> Either he wanted to educate

Yeah, Professor Tao has been known to try that from time to time.

[rubatuga]

Yeah, that article really took a sudden nosedive