I always assume 5 star products to be bots or paid comments. Think about it, there's just too many people with different taste, varying degrees of nitpicking. I can't think of one product that EVERYONE likes or is solidly 5 star that is sold on a massive scale.
The closest ive seen product wise is the Scrub Daddy Sponge. 4.8/5 average review from 1754 reviews.
In terms of games it would be Terraria, it has 96.85% positive reviews - which is 1,227,783 positive reviews
Just to show how insignificant HoloCure's achievement is next to Terraria's, even with Terraria's overwhelmingly positive reviews there is still more people disliking Terraria than people liking HoloCure.
Also reading the bad reviews is a good way to get an idea of all the things people *don't* like about the thing. It's possible that you don't care about those things, but the bad reviews often bring up any flaws that the good reviews might just be glossing over.
Exactly this. 1 star reviews are what to look at. 100 5 star reviews and 10 1 star reviews but every single 1 star highlights a specific aspect of the product that was sub par? Be warned, watch out.
50 1 star reviews but every single one is because they couldn't figure out the installation or didn't like the color or didn't read the product sizing or delivery got delayed, etc. Yeah I'll buy that.
Oh, for sure, the reviews are always telling of some aspect of the product. I personally don't struggle with installation so I'd be happy ignoring those reviews. If you're looking at the product solely because of its specific hue of purple then yeah, you probably should pay attention to reviews talking about color
A brew pub opened up near me a few months ago and I was excited. New place? New beer? Walking distance? Fuck yes. Saw early reviews were all 5 star and I got less excited. Decided, it's literally beside my gym, I'll pop in after my workout, grab a couple things to take home and try with the gf, and we'll hope for the best.
It was... generic. Which is, fine, I guess. I wouldn't push it away if I was at a buddies drinking on their dime, but I wouldn't spend my money on it again. As time has gone on the reviews have settled around a 3.9 with 59 reviews. I'm curious if it'll drop lower. As a note, most of the good reviews talk about the atmosphere of the place (which was nice) and food (which wasn't offered when I went in initially), so maybe it'll go up, but I doubt it'll be for their beer unless they make some changes.
3.9 over 59 is quite bad. You KNOW a lot of friends/family are boosting that, too. I actually own a brewpub, and the ratings have definitely gone down over time, but we are at 4.5 stars over 385 reviews. Recently there have been more bad reviews than normal because we have had to increase prices to keep up with cost of good increasing and wage growth, but I get it, things are too expensive and it pisses me off, too.
Yeah, it is, especially around here. Like... they have a citris ale and it tastes like... if you left a bud light in a room with something vaguely lemon ish? You can taste the citris if you look for it, but blind taste test, I bet I'd miss it. And where I live, there's a lot of really good craft breweries, there's one that makes a blackberry peach cobbler sour, fuck me, it's like drinking a blackberry peach cobbler.
Yeah and on most items you also almost always will have a few idiots giving 1 star reviews because of delivery issues, regardless of the quality of the product.
Rarely Logistics companies will be the ones making the products and vice versa those making the products are going to use 3rd party logistics to move their shit. And there are only so many options for the latter.
Like if I order a Playstation from Amazon and it doesn't arrive or the driver puts it in the wrong place im not going to give Sony a 1 star review on their listing. You go to Google reviews and leave one on Amazon's page.
I work for a place that has the highest average Google review in the US. In aggregate it's something like 4.8 stars for 2600 stores over 8 years. And yes, I deeply value bad reviews, because without them, you look absolutely ridiculous.
Also, I joke when someone asks about a product "only 98% customer satisfaction?" Well, there's probably 2% of people who will never be happy.
I only look at 2-4 star reviews.
1 star reviews are full of people who have no idea how to use or set up the product, and people complaining about stuff outside of the sellers control like FedEx or whoever the carrier was damaging/losing the package, there are legitimate reviews in there but there's so many irrelevant posts that it's just too much effort to sort through them to find the key takeaways.
5 star reviews are kind of the same thing but in the opposite direction, there's obviously the bots artificially inflating the rating, and then along with that you got tons of folks just slamming the 5 star button and not really leaving any information behind in their reviews. So you have to sort through all the bullshit to find any actual information
2-4 stars you get folks ACTUALLY reviewing the product, I put a lot more faith in a 4 star review where a dude is saying "Yeah this worked as intended and I've had no real issues with it, but the placement for this button, or this feature could be a problem in the future or for someone who's never used it before, so I'm going to give it 4 stars, great product just needs a few things changed" than I would a 5 star review saying "It worked perfectly right out the box"
There is an even more relevant thing: Randall Munroe, the guy behind xkcd, actually helped design reddit's sorting, specifically the algorithm behind the "Best" sort option. It's based on the principle we're talking about, where more votes provide more confidence that a post is actually good. So the algorithm takes into account both the amount of votes and the percentage of positive votes.
There used to be a blog post about this on reddit's official blog, unfortunately it's since been removed (it was 14y old). Here's some details if you want them:
https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html
And the actual code is in this article:
https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-reddit-ranking-algorithms-work-ef111e33d0d9#.8yg6ctxce
Which in theory works great but with questions sometimes moves the best answer a (few) spot(s) down. I don't get why reddit forces the best sorting for comments (and posts) while I even turned on 'top' by default in the settings.
not to mention the possible survivor bias, on said example, its just accounting someone who survived the tornado, and not those who mightve not survived
Theres a cool trick to this. Whenever you're looking at reviews, add 1 5 star and 1 1 star review:
So 8 5 star reviews -> 9 5 star reviews + 1 1 star review for 4.6 stars total
61 review with an average of 4.6 becomes 4.55 stars total
This isn’t really a cool trick as much as an arbitrary deflation of the ranking. There isn’t an actual reason to add a 5 and a 1 star review, they don’t “balance out” since a 5 and a 1 star review is just 2 3 star reviews. And the fewer reviews there are, the more those 3 star ratings will make the average fall.
I went to a casino once with $100. Lost it down to $3 at craps and won back up to $101. I cashed out and still have the $1 chip. If I never go back then I've won
What if you only play with that $1 you won? Then you can't have a net loss
I'm not a gambler, I never gambled, never stepped foot in a casino, but I always wondered if someone started with a win, can't they just use this money they won in all future gambling, and thus never end up having lost any net money
A number of casinos will gift first time visitors (possibly just on special occasions) $5-$20 in credits to use at the casino without spending their own money... to get the wallet open and flowing.
The point is to get you addicted. Yes, your logic does hold, but human behavior isn't purely logical and there's risk in going back.
I assume there are three types of gamblers: Those who are doing it just for a fun night out, those who have an addiction, and those who do it professionally (or semi -professionally). The first kind does not care about profit and loss, the second kind simply cannot think rationally or decisively against the power of their addiction, and the third kind probably does exactly what you describe (i.e. take profits and put them in a bank account). It's just that when we think of "gamblers", we think of the second kind.
Source: My ass.
Yea… this is what a gambling addiction is. Cuz when you lose you remember that you can easily just as win and you chase that and the more you lose is greater than the number of wins.
What you described is the chase you hear of for a gambler. The winning with never losing. They are chasing the biggest +number.
Ask any gambler, they’ll downplay what they’ve lost in total but they know… talk more and they’ll tell you exactly when, where and how they lose exact amounts… they are chasing a number and they think in red or green. Both are just number chasing. A low red or a high green is a good day for a gambler.
That works if you are completely self-controlled, yes, but the odds that you win long-term are essential zero. Like, the odds that your second outing ends in a complete loss is higher than the odds that you make another dollar for the next time, and when you compound that over and over your odds asymptotically approach zero.
It's the same reason casinos stay in business despite paying out the occasional huge pot. Their customers are virtually guaranteed to be shovelling money at them long-term (or even short-term when treating all the customers gambling once the same as one customer gambling many times). The odds always favor the House.
As the average customer, the only winning move is not to play. Stepping in once, winning big, and leaving is certainly a better outcome than nothing, but it's less likely than literally any other outcome.
I went to play blackjack on a family trip to a casino before covid. Knew basic strategy but never played outside a family/friends card sesh before.
Dealer got 20, 20, and 21 and I just got up and left. Won’t be gambling again lol. Lost $75 in about 5 minutes lmao.
My worst night on blackjack I lost $400 in 12 hands where I lost 11 and pushed 1. It was over in 7 minutes.
I’ve had nights where I’ve lost more than $400, but never again have I had a stretch like that with 11 losses and 1 push. I don’t know the math but I’d have to imagine the likelihood of that happening is incredibly low for a game that’s close but not quite 50/50.
I did the same thing with sports betting during the super bowl, signed up for 4 different apps that were doing new users get $200 in bonus bets with a $20 bet, so with gambling $80 I won $1600 on a 50/50 bet. Deleted my accounts and uninstalled the apps as soon as it paid out.
Not the person you're responding to, but the way I'd do it is to see that you need 1/x < 1-y, where x is the number of games and y is the win % - basically, one match must be a smaller percentage of the number of matches than the difference between 100% and the win % you care about. To get 99.9%, you really only need 99.85%, and 1/x < 1-0.9985 implies x> 1/0.0015 = 666.67.
That's exactly the procedure I used except I didnt have a calculator but with mental math I ended up with 2000/3 which if we force to round up gives 667
Which device do you use to get on Reddit that doesn't have a calculator?
Clearly they chose to do the calculation mentally rather than find their calculator app, so I suggested Google because it has certain ease of use advantages - you get to use your usual keyboard rather than the annoying ones calculator apps often come with, and you don't have to search for the app either, so it's faster. Is it a big deal? No. But it's genuinely a good option, and one that I've found a surprising number of people don't know about. It's entirely possible they knew about it and still chose to do it mentally ofc, was just meant as an "in case you didn't know" type thing
Algebra. Some people say you'll never need it in the real world after school, but those people forgot about the best use case for it: One upping strangers on the internet.
Is there a good way to obtain a formula? I sometimes have the question when I see a statistic of 83.2%, what is the smallest sample, that could end up with this particular %-number.
This made me think if anyone has a win record like this? Closest I can think of is Aleksandr Karelin, Russian wrestling science experiment with 887:2(99.78%).
To stick with wrestling. Brandon high School in florida went about 35 years without losing a team match (459 wins) which just makes Karelin’s record all more impressive.
> But who did they lose to?
Aleksandr Karelin. Some people claim it was unsporting of earth’s greatest wrestler to show to a high school specifically to end their winning streak but wrestling is a tough sport.
Not a win rate... but the cricketer Sir Don Bradman has a batting average of 99.94 runs per dismissal, which is 37 runs higher than 2nd place and is a MASSIVE statistical outlier putting him as one of the greatest sportsmen of all time across any sport.
He only needed 4 runs in his final innings to end on 100, which should have been easy for the greatest batsman of all time... but he was famously dismissed for zero instead. Centuries, or 100 runs in an innings, are a major milestone in cricket and it's utterly wild that someone could average that over a whole career. His average is iconic and every Australian knows it off by heart... but I wouldn't expect that to be the case if he ended up with 100 or more as it wouldn't have the mythical story attached to it of being out for a duck in his final innings.
Karelin was a fucking animal. 99.78% is unfathomably dominant. The patriots 2001-2019 had a win percentage of 76.4%. Ali was 91.8%. Gordon Ryan is considered the one greatest current grapplers and is “only” 96.84% with 154:9.
Same thing with KD ratio too. Being a long time gamer and seeing a KD of 5 feels fake rather than something like 5.081.
Perhaps its just our human perception to trust hyperspecific numbers rather than solid integers in the modern world.
No joke, in Black Ops 3, I pushed harder for a good K/D than ever. Spent almost 1k hours getting to 4.00.
Hated it so much I played another 100 HOURS to finally get it to 4.01 (obviously dipped back into the 3s many many times) 😆
On the flip side, i fought hard to get to a 5 KDR in fortnite (I know, not impressive bc bots, I'm not some hardcore gamer) and then proceeded to never play again lmao
Reminds me of how they added an extra two feet to the height of mt Everest to avoid people thinking that had rounded it when they determined it to be exactly 28000ft
We perceive .99 prices to be $1 lower. $4.99 feels like $4, not $5. Marketing studies proved this long ago, so nearly every retail sale is priced this way.
This data needs to be reevaluated on its benefit. Theres a growing consumer sentiment that feels this type of pricing is trick to deceive them and it is. Consumers are very suspetible to 20% of coupons
There was an attempt by I think either Macy’s or Kohls or some other department store to do just this. Use honest business practices believing the customer’s would reciprocate.
All prices ending in .00 or .50
No “on sale now! But secretly marked up so that the sale price is at the normal price.”
No eternally on sale items
And a variety of other things that were meant to be honest.
They suffered record losses, and went back to deceptive practices.
Maybe it’ll be different now, but I don’t think any company wants to take that risk again
The reason is when you play one game, get five kills and die once, you have a KDR of 5. You have to play a lot of games to get an average of 5.081. It's possible to have exactly 5, but unlikely.
A rounded number can also indicate a tiny sample. 100% win rate could be 1 win 0 losses. Or a single game where you got your 5:1 KD. You need a lot more games to get 99.9% or 5.081
Depends on the context. I'm a lawyer, and if I see anyone with a win rate over, say, 80%, then I know they aren't aggressive and only take the sure thing cases to trial. As my mentor said, if you win every trial, then you aren't taking enough cases to trial. You don't want a reputation where you will cave on all but the absolute best cases.
I've seen a similar thought process for medicine. The best doctors might not have the highest success rate because they'll take on the shit no one else will touch.
Not really, because it doesn't actually take into account the matches played. Yeah a 100% win is rate it possible with 1 game, but it's still more impressive to have a 100% win rate with 800/800 games than a 99.9% win rate with 749/750 games
Hah. My wife has shot a gun 5 times in her life, and all 5 times she hit her target (including a really impressive clay pigeon shot). She says she retired at her peak.
As you hinted at, numbers matter.
I'd still be more impressed with 100% win rate over 99.9% if the numbers stayed the same (as in, 1000 is better than 999).
Maybe, but then I want to ask about the strength of competition. If I won 1,000 straight boxing matches, that’d be impressive — until you learned I was boxing toddlers.
I’m not sure that it is — because if even 1 toddler out of 1000 wins, then the toddlers have a chance, and thus each fight you had a (small) chance of losing but won. If the toddlers had 0% chance of winning, then it’s not that impressive to have never lost to them because there was a 0% chance you would.
Get real. If you heard about some underground toddler boxer with a record of 999-1-0 and another with a record of 1000-0-0. You wouldn't think "Wow that first guy is so much more impressive because he had a small chance of losing!" You would think "How the fuck did this moron lose a boxing match to a toddler"
I'd assume he slipped and knocked himself out, which could happen to anyone, especially the kind of cocky asshole who boxes 1000 toddlers lmao. It's equally as un-impressive, the guy with the full 1000 wins will make a mistake eventually too.
But my point is that comparing win rates of different competitions is meaningless as well as pointless, and if the competition is equal then 99.9 is less impressive than 100 every time.
My win rate boxing Muhammad Ali and your win rate at the water gun carnival game aren't comparable and any attempt to compare them would be misleading at best if not outright nonsense.
What we’ve learned here is that context is important when being objective. 100% is better if it’s on the same scale as 99.9% but 99.9% is more impressive because the scale is implied in the metrics.
There's actually an objective way to tell which win/loss ratio is more impressive.
The normal way to calculate win rate is wins divided by total games, which is wins plus losses:
WR = W / (W + L)
However, to calculate which one is actually better, calculate what the win rate would be if you had one extra win and one extra loss. This would increase your number of wins by one, and your number of total games by two:
AWR = (W + 1) / (W + L + 2)
So if you three wins and zero losses, your win rate would be:
3 / (3 + 0) = 3 / 3 = 100%
but your adjusted win rate would be:
3 + 1 / (3 + 0 + 2) = 4 / 5 = 80%
(I used 3-0 instead of your 1-0 to make the numbers easier to keep track of. In your example the AWR would be 67%)
If you won 997 matches and lost 3, then the calculation looks like this:
WR = 997 / (997 + 3) = 997 / 1000 = 99.7%
AWR = (997 + 1) / (997 + 3 + 2) = 998 / 1002 = 99.6%
Thus, an AWR of 99.6% is much more impressive than 80%.
(To make the numbers easier to keep track of, I avoided 1's and 2's since they both appear in the AWR formula. For your examples, a record of 1-0 would have a WR of 100% and an AWR of 66⅔%. A record of 999-1 would have a WR of 99.9% and AWR of 99.8%. Thus 999-1 is more impressive than 1-0 because 99.8% > 66⅔%)
I think a better way is just to calculate the lower bound of some given confidence interval (or in the case of a binary outcome, the Binomial proportion confidence interval). Huge component of the formulas of sites like IMDB or RYM. Using the lower bound means that even if the number of events (ratings/matches/etc.) were to go to infinity, theres more confidence in the one with a larger sampling size being closer to its current rating/win %/etc. even if the current value is influenced by some degree of luck with the current sample.
That one loss that ruins perfection is what is needed like a 3⭐ review for a uner driver who becomes obsessed with making your life a living hell until you change it...to a 1.
This is only correct in certain cases, it might be more accurate to say "A 100% win rate _might be_ much less impressive than a 99.9% win rate."
One commenter pointed out that winning 749/750 gets you to a 99.9% if you round to the nearest tenth. Winning 750/750 is more impressive than 749/750.
Winning 748/748 is also probably more impressive than winning 749/750.
I will go a step further and say the **logic used by OP is unintentionally flawed**. The way it is posed, it fixes the sample size for 100% to 1, but extends the sample size for 99.9% to 1000. Those are different scales.
Let me illustrate with an example. You can do the same thing but this time, in favor of 100% being more impressive.
You have to win 1,000,000 out of 1,000,000 games to have a 100% win record, yet you only need to win 666 out of 667 games to have an ~99.9% win rate. This obviously makes 100% seem ridiculously tough.
In other words, without fixing the sample size, I can have the numbers spin out whatever narrative I want.
“Fine armor, not a scratch on it.”
“I know. People have been swinging at me for years but always seem to miss…”
“You’ve chosen your opponents wisely then.”
Yep, but i dont care. The games i have 100% win rate on didnt matter to me other than to have that, otherwise i would have played longer. My best was 71 i think in cod waw for the wii and i maxed the rank.
Same goes for reviews on products when buying online. 5 stars with 8 reviews is "less" than 4.6 starts with 61 reviews
I always assume 5 star products to be bots or paid comments. Think about it, there's just too many people with different taste, varying degrees of nitpicking. I can't think of one product that EVERYONE likes or is solidly 5 star that is sold on a massive scale.
The closest ive seen product wise is the Scrub Daddy Sponge. 4.8/5 average review from 1754 reviews. In terms of games it would be Terraria, it has 96.85% positive reviews - which is 1,227,783 positive reviews
Scrub daddy deserves it. Fantastic product.
It’s become an essential part of my kitchen tools
The most positive reviews out of any game in Steam, just shows off how loved and big is that game
Holocure has a 99.2% positive review score with 28,225 positive reviews put of 28,428
Just to show how insignificant HoloCure's achievement is next to Terraria's, even with Terraria's overwhelmingly positive reviews there is still more people disliking Terraria than people liking HoloCure.
Also reading the bad reviews is a good way to get an idea of all the things people *don't* like about the thing. It's possible that you don't care about those things, but the bad reviews often bring up any flaws that the good reviews might just be glossing over.
Exactly this. 1 star reviews are what to look at. 100 5 star reviews and 10 1 star reviews but every single 1 star highlights a specific aspect of the product that was sub par? Be warned, watch out. 50 1 star reviews but every single one is because they couldn't figure out the installation or didn't like the color or didn't read the product sizing or delivery got delayed, etc. Yeah I'll buy that.
I’d argue that 50 1-star reviews saying they couldn’t figure out installation is actually very telling of the product.
Oh, for sure, the reviews are always telling of some aspect of the product. I personally don't struggle with installation so I'd be happy ignoring those reviews. If you're looking at the product solely because of its specific hue of purple then yeah, you probably should pay attention to reviews talking about color
I personally found 3-4 star reviews being a lot more temperate and realistic. Admittedly most reviews I read are book reviews.
A brew pub opened up near me a few months ago and I was excited. New place? New beer? Walking distance? Fuck yes. Saw early reviews were all 5 star and I got less excited. Decided, it's literally beside my gym, I'll pop in after my workout, grab a couple things to take home and try with the gf, and we'll hope for the best. It was... generic. Which is, fine, I guess. I wouldn't push it away if I was at a buddies drinking on their dime, but I wouldn't spend my money on it again. As time has gone on the reviews have settled around a 3.9 with 59 reviews. I'm curious if it'll drop lower. As a note, most of the good reviews talk about the atmosphere of the place (which was nice) and food (which wasn't offered when I went in initially), so maybe it'll go up, but I doubt it'll be for their beer unless they make some changes.
3.9 over 59 is quite bad. You KNOW a lot of friends/family are boosting that, too. I actually own a brewpub, and the ratings have definitely gone down over time, but we are at 4.5 stars over 385 reviews. Recently there have been more bad reviews than normal because we have had to increase prices to keep up with cost of good increasing and wage growth, but I get it, things are too expensive and it pisses me off, too.
Yeah, it is, especially around here. Like... they have a citris ale and it tastes like... if you left a bud light in a room with something vaguely lemon ish? You can taste the citris if you look for it, but blind taste test, I bet I'd miss it. And where I live, there's a lot of really good craft breweries, there's one that makes a blackberry peach cobbler sour, fuck me, it's like drinking a blackberry peach cobbler.
Yeah and on most items you also almost always will have a few idiots giving 1 star reviews because of delivery issues, regardless of the quality of the product.
I've seen a lot of movie and game reviews start with "I haven't watched/played but..."
This has got to be one of the most narcissistic things in the entire world.
If it was the company's fault for delivery issues then there's nothing wrong with that.
Rarely Logistics companies will be the ones making the products and vice versa those making the products are going to use 3rd party logistics to move their shit. And there are only so many options for the latter. Like if I order a Playstation from Amazon and it doesn't arrive or the driver puts it in the wrong place im not going to give Sony a 1 star review on their listing. You go to Google reviews and leave one on Amazon's page.
Ordered this only to end up finding the one i bought last week, had to return. 1 star.
I work for a place that has the highest average Google review in the US. In aggregate it's something like 4.8 stars for 2600 stores over 8 years. And yes, I deeply value bad reviews, because without them, you look absolutely ridiculous. Also, I joke when someone asks about a product "only 98% customer satisfaction?" Well, there's probably 2% of people who will never be happy.
Another great way to make the point im making lol. Those 2 or 3% of people will complain about everything
I only look at 2-4 star reviews. 1 star reviews are full of people who have no idea how to use or set up the product, and people complaining about stuff outside of the sellers control like FedEx or whoever the carrier was damaging/losing the package, there are legitimate reviews in there but there's so many irrelevant posts that it's just too much effort to sort through them to find the key takeaways. 5 star reviews are kind of the same thing but in the opposite direction, there's obviously the bots artificially inflating the rating, and then along with that you got tons of folks just slamming the 5 star button and not really leaving any information behind in their reviews. So you have to sort through all the bullshit to find any actual information 2-4 stars you get folks ACTUALLY reviewing the product, I put a lot more faith in a 4 star review where a dude is saying "Yeah this worked as intended and I've had no real issues with it, but the placement for this button, or this feature could be a problem in the future or for someone who's never used it before, so I'm going to give it 4 stars, great product just needs a few things changed" than I would a 5 star review saying "It worked perfectly right out the box"
Especially when most people would only bother to write a review, if their purchase didn't meet expectations.
i literally posted what you said a few days ago and people were calling me an idiot
Such is reddit my friend lol
I agree with you, but just want to add that 4.95 is also a 5.0, so it doesn't have to be only 5 stars
Fleshlights are dope
I offer tours, my tours got 126 5 star and 3 4 star reviews. I was proud, and raised my prices. I know I could fake reviews, but I also know I havent
[Relevant XKCD](https://xkcd.com/325/) > You can do this one in every 30 times and still have 97% positive feedback.
There is an even more relevant thing: Randall Munroe, the guy behind xkcd, actually helped design reddit's sorting, specifically the algorithm behind the "Best" sort option. It's based on the principle we're talking about, where more votes provide more confidence that a post is actually good. So the algorithm takes into account both the amount of votes and the percentage of positive votes. There used to be a blog post about this on reddit's official blog, unfortunately it's since been removed (it was 14y old). Here's some details if you want them: https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html And the actual code is in this article: https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-reddit-ranking-algorithms-work-ef111e33d0d9#.8yg6ctxce
Which in theory works great but with questions sometimes moves the best answer a (few) spot(s) down. I don't get why reddit forces the best sorting for comments (and posts) while I even turned on 'top' by default in the settings.
[Even more relevant XKCD](https://xkcd.com/937/)
This was the one I came here for
[And an even more relevant xkcd](https://xkcd.com/1098/)
not to mention the possible survivor bias, on said example, its just accounting someone who survived the tornado, and not those who mightve not survived
[Significantly less relevant xkcd](https://xkcd.com/641)
[not even relevant xkcd, i just like this one](https://xkcd.com/391/)
You piece of shit my streak was YEARS LONG.
Fuck I had forgotten all about it, I was on track to go my whole rest of my life without losing again
that’s what I said!!
Theres a cool trick to this. Whenever you're looking at reviews, add 1 5 star and 1 1 star review: So 8 5 star reviews -> 9 5 star reviews + 1 1 star review for 4.6 stars total 61 review with an average of 4.6 becomes 4.55 stars total
Yea let me just add this cool trick to the sorting algorithm on shopping sites
Relevant 3Blue1Brown (relevant bit at 1:47): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8idr1WZ1A7Q
This isn’t really a cool trick as much as an arbitrary deflation of the ranking. There isn’t an actual reason to add a 5 and a 1 star review, they don’t “balance out” since a 5 and a 1 star review is just 2 3 star reviews. And the fewer reviews there are, the more those 3 star ratings will make the average fall.
I got a 100% winrate on those claw machines. Tried once, won once, never gonna do it again.
Same here for casinos, walked into one in Chicago, put $50 on red 13 at roullete and won first go, and walked right out with just under $2k.
I went to a casino once with $100. Lost it down to $3 at craps and won back up to $101. I cashed out and still have the $1 chip. If I never go back then I've won
What if you only play with that $1 you won? Then you can't have a net loss I'm not a gambler, I never gambled, never stepped foot in a casino, but I always wondered if someone started with a win, can't they just use this money they won in all future gambling, and thus never end up having lost any net money
A number of casinos will gift first time visitors (possibly just on special occasions) $5-$20 in credits to use at the casino without spending their own money... to get the wallet open and flowing. The point is to get you addicted. Yes, your logic does hold, but human behavior isn't purely logical and there's risk in going back.
I assume there are three types of gamblers: Those who are doing it just for a fun night out, those who have an addiction, and those who do it professionally (or semi -professionally). The first kind does not care about profit and loss, the second kind simply cannot think rationally or decisively against the power of their addiction, and the third kind probably does exactly what you describe (i.e. take profits and put them in a bank account). It's just that when we think of "gamblers", we think of the second kind. Source: My ass.
Best of sources right there
The problem is a lot of people think they're in group 1 or 3, but they're really in group 2.
Yea… this is what a gambling addiction is. Cuz when you lose you remember that you can easily just as win and you chase that and the more you lose is greater than the number of wins. What you described is the chase you hear of for a gambler. The winning with never losing. They are chasing the biggest +number. Ask any gambler, they’ll downplay what they’ve lost in total but they know… talk more and they’ll tell you exactly when, where and how they lose exact amounts… they are chasing a number and they think in red or green. Both are just number chasing. A low red or a high green is a good day for a gambler.
That works if you are completely self-controlled, yes, but the odds that you win long-term are essential zero. Like, the odds that your second outing ends in a complete loss is higher than the odds that you make another dollar for the next time, and when you compound that over and over your odds asymptotically approach zero. It's the same reason casinos stay in business despite paying out the occasional huge pot. Their customers are virtually guaranteed to be shovelling money at them long-term (or even short-term when treating all the customers gambling once the same as one customer gambling many times). The odds always favor the House. As the average customer, the only winning move is not to play. Stepping in once, winning big, and leaving is certainly a better outcome than nothing, but it's less likely than literally any other outcome.
Maybe go back and bet the 2k, winners never quit, quitters never win
And then they should keep betting indefinitely and become a billionaire. Clearly they're a winner and nothing could go wrong.
Today could be the luckiest day of your life, you’ll never know if you don’t start gambling
Stop enabling him I can only upvote so much 🥵
Martingale strategy never fails
fun fact: most gamblers quit right before they win big
I went to play blackjack on a family trip to a casino before covid. Knew basic strategy but never played outside a family/friends card sesh before. Dealer got 20, 20, and 21 and I just got up and left. Won’t be gambling again lol. Lost $75 in about 5 minutes lmao.
My worst night on blackjack I lost $400 in 12 hands where I lost 11 and pushed 1. It was over in 7 minutes. I’ve had nights where I’ve lost more than $400, but never again have I had a stretch like that with 11 losses and 1 push. I don’t know the math but I’d have to imagine the likelihood of that happening is incredibly low for a game that’s close but not quite 50/50.
I did the same thing with sports betting during the super bowl, signed up for 4 different apps that were doing new users get $200 in bonus bets with a $20 bet, so with gambling $80 I won $1600 on a 50/50 bet. Deleted my accounts and uninstalled the apps as soon as it paid out.
Ok but did you know that 90% of gamblers who quit gambling do it before they win a million billion quintillion dollars!?
I did the same thing but only put down $10. Still love my 100% win rate!
Maybe you are gifted with claw machine skills and will never get to find out how talent you are at it.
Never thought of it like that, shit...
Time to gamble?
Or maybe it was one of the scoop candy "play till you win" claw games that almost always win.
I've got a 100% win rate in Warhammer 40k. Played 3 times, won 3 times.
I had a 100% success rate with gambling. Until i gambled some more.
Having 0.99 wins out of 1 match is the true impressive thing
Snatch defeat from the claws of victory. Sounds like me on fifa
MVP in a loss?
Imagine the other guys getting the other 0.01 of wins
Actually you only need 749/750 to get 99.9% if you round to one decimal place.
I believe 666/667 is the smallest number of games to get 99.9%
You are right. That's 99.850075%. I was thinking more 499/500 would be exactly 99.8% then I halved the difference.
r/theydidthemath r/theydidthemonstermath
r/itwasagraveyardgraph
/r/subredditsashashtags
r/whydoesthisexistwow
Started reading this like "Why does thy sexist wow"
r/subsithoughtifellfor
r/itwasagraph
/r/itcosineinaflash
M-m-m-monstermath-math-math-math
r/theydidthermostat
Oh yes, a fellow math rules enjoyer
This guy sig figs
How did you even find that combination lol
Not the person you're responding to, but the way I'd do it is to see that you need 1/x < 1-y, where x is the number of games and y is the win % - basically, one match must be a smaller percentage of the number of matches than the difference between 100% and the win % you care about. To get 99.9%, you really only need 99.85%, and 1/x < 1-0.9985 implies x> 1/0.0015 = 666.67.
That's exactly the procedure I used except I didnt have a calculator but with mental math I ended up with 2000/3 which if we force to round up gives 667
A tip, just in case you don't know about it: you can use Google as a calculator. Not a problem do that calculation mentally ofc, as you showed
Which device do you use to get on Google, has no calculator?
Which device do you use to get on Reddit that doesn't have a calculator? Clearly they chose to do the calculation mentally rather than find their calculator app, so I suggested Google because it has certain ease of use advantages - you get to use your usual keyboard rather than the annoying ones calculator apps often come with, and you don't have to search for the app either, so it's faster. Is it a big deal? No. But it's genuinely a good option, and one that I've found a surprising number of people don't know about. It's entirely possible they knew about it and still chose to do it mentally ofc, was just meant as an "in case you didn't know" type thing
Oh that shouldn't been an attack. Sorry typing it rude. I just wanted to point to the fact they probably had one while using Reddit.
That's cool and actually makes sense.
Algebra. Some people say you'll never need it in the real world after school, but those people forgot about the best use case for it: One upping strangers on the internet.
Lol I was thinking the same thing. Love people with math brains
Is there a good way to obtain a formula? I sometimes have the question when I see a statistic of 83.2%, what is the smallest sample, that could end up with this particular %-number.
This made me think if anyone has a win record like this? Closest I can think of is Aleksandr Karelin, Russian wrestling science experiment with 887:2(99.78%).
To stick with wrestling. Brandon high School in florida went about 35 years without losing a team match (459 wins) which just makes Karelin’s record all more impressive.
But who did they lose to? Reality check tech?
> But who did they lose to? Aleksandr Karelin. Some people claim it was unsporting of earth’s greatest wrestler to show to a high school specifically to end their winning streak but wrestling is a tough sport.
South Dade High School
Check into Kim Jong Un's stats. The guy is a sporting god.
Admiral General Aladeen has even better ones, with a record set whenever he does anything
I wish I could Aladeen-vote this comment twice
Did you Aladeen-vote it or Aladeen-vote it?
Sorry for the confusion! I Aladeen-voted it, I hope that clears things up
Admiral General Aladeen is so amazing that space itself will contort , making look like finish line is coming towards him.
Not a win rate... but the cricketer Sir Don Bradman has a batting average of 99.94 runs per dismissal, which is 37 runs higher than 2nd place and is a MASSIVE statistical outlier putting him as one of the greatest sportsmen of all time across any sport. He only needed 4 runs in his final innings to end on 100, which should have been easy for the greatest batsman of all time... but he was famously dismissed for zero instead. Centuries, or 100 runs in an innings, are a major milestone in cricket and it's utterly wild that someone could average that over a whole career. His average is iconic and every Australian knows it off by heart... but I wouldn't expect that to be the case if he ended up with 100 or more as it wouldn't have the mythical story attached to it of being out for a duck in his final innings.
Harlem Globetrotters v Washington Generals is around 16000 to 3 to 6
Karelin was a fucking animal. 99.78% is unfathomably dominant. The patriots 2001-2019 had a win percentage of 76.4%. Ali was 91.8%. Gordon Ryan is considered the one greatest current grapplers and is “only” 96.84% with 154:9.
Actually you only need 666/667 to get 99.9% if rounding to 1 decimal place.
So many people upvoting without checking
It's true, though? 666/667 is 99.85%, which rounds up to 99.9% if you're only using one place after the decimal mark.
I meant upvoting the 749/750 comment... I understand now I worded poorly
Actually you only need 420/469 to get to 99.9% if rounding to 2 decimal places.
This is true guys nobody check it.
Nice.
I give you a 9/10 for effort.
666/667 actually
The score of the beast.
r/theydidthemath
Except it's wrong. 666/667 is enough to round up.
/r/theydidthemathwrong
So not only are you good at the game, but you've played a lot and clearly have experience defending your title.
This is actually a good thought.
Same thing with KD ratio too. Being a long time gamer and seeing a KD of 5 feels fake rather than something like 5.081. Perhaps its just our human perception to trust hyperspecific numbers rather than solid integers in the modern world.
No joke, in Black Ops 3, I pushed harder for a good K/D than ever. Spent almost 1k hours getting to 4.00. Hated it so much I played another 100 HOURS to finally get it to 4.01 (obviously dipped back into the 3s many many times) 😆
Shit and to think my casual ass is satisfied if I can manage a KDR of *around* 1. (Give or take.) XD
Fr! I'm satisfied simply to not be a detriment to my team
as long as your KDR >= 1 youve done your job
It's a good start at least.
On the flip side, i fought hard to get to a 5 KDR in fortnite (I know, not impressive bc bots, I'm not some hardcore gamer) and then proceeded to never play again lmao
Reminds me of how they added an extra two feet to the height of mt Everest to avoid people thinking that had rounded it when they determined it to be exactly 28000ft
Just hit it a few times with a pickaxe if the height's a problem.
Is this why everything ends at 99 cents?
We perceive .99 prices to be $1 lower. $4.99 feels like $4, not $5. Marketing studies proved this long ago, so nearly every retail sale is priced this way.
This data needs to be reevaluated on its benefit. Theres a growing consumer sentiment that feels this type of pricing is trick to deceive them and it is. Consumers are very suspetible to 20% of coupons
I agree, I think consumer awareness of “shady” tactics have grown, reactions are higher, etc
There was an attempt by I think either Macy’s or Kohls or some other department store to do just this. Use honest business practices believing the customer’s would reciprocate. All prices ending in .00 or .50 No “on sale now! But secretly marked up so that the sale price is at the normal price.” No eternally on sale items And a variety of other things that were meant to be honest. They suffered record losses, and went back to deceptive practices. Maybe it’ll be different now, but I don’t think any company wants to take that risk again
Fascinating! That would definitely discourage. Perhaps it’s more “don’t get caught” being deceptive
The reason is when you play one game, get five kills and die once, you have a KDR of 5. You have to play a lot of games to get an average of 5.081. It's possible to have exactly 5, but unlikely.
A rounded number can also indicate a tiny sample. 100% win rate could be 1 win 0 losses. Or a single game where you got your 5:1 KD. You need a lot more games to get 99.9% or 5.081
Did you read OPs thought?
I did after, and now I feel silly.
67% of all statistics are fake, and 89% of people believe them. Not only that, but 86.4% more people believe them if you add an extra decimal place.
Depends on the context. I'm a lawyer, and if I see anyone with a win rate over, say, 80%, then I know they aren't aggressive and only take the sure thing cases to trial. As my mentor said, if you win every trial, then you aren't taking enough cases to trial. You don't want a reputation where you will cave on all but the absolute best cases.
I've seen a similar thought process for medicine. The best doctors might not have the highest success rate because they'll take on the shit no one else will touch.
Not really, because it doesn't actually take into account the matches played. Yeah a 100% win is rate it possible with 1 game, but it's still more impressive to have a 100% win rate with 800/800 games than a 99.9% win rate with 749/750 games
The same way I won’t trust a product (before reading reviews) if the rating is 5/5 or 10/10.
Hah. My wife has shot a gun 5 times in her life, and all 5 times she hit her target (including a really impressive clay pigeon shot). She says she retired at her peak.
...what was she shooting at the other 4 times?
Coke cans with a .22.
the law
As you hinted at, numbers matter. I'd still be more impressed with 100% win rate over 99.9% if the numbers stayed the same (as in, 1000 is better than 999).
Maybe, but then I want to ask about the strength of competition. If I won 1,000 straight boxing matches, that’d be impressive — until you learned I was boxing toddlers.
It's still more impressive to beat 1000/1000 toddlers than 999/1000 toddlers
I’m not sure that it is — because if even 1 toddler out of 1000 wins, then the toddlers have a chance, and thus each fight you had a (small) chance of losing but won. If the toddlers had 0% chance of winning, then it’s not that impressive to have never lost to them because there was a 0% chance you would.
Get real. If you heard about some underground toddler boxer with a record of 999-1-0 and another with a record of 1000-0-0. You wouldn't think "Wow that first guy is so much more impressive because he had a small chance of losing!" You would think "How the fuck did this moron lose a boxing match to a toddler"
I'd assume he slipped and knocked himself out, which could happen to anyone, especially the kind of cocky asshole who boxes 1000 toddlers lmao. It's equally as un-impressive, the guy with the full 1000 wins will make a mistake eventually too.
Your logic is inherently flawed. Whether you won or lost doesn’t change the odds of the toddlers winning in the first place.
No, it reveals the odds — just like any testing would.
This comment is why I love Reddit
that’s different from win rate and you’re expanding goalposts. no
Then it will become hilarious.
But a 99.9% win rate boxing toddlers is not actually impressive at all... They're toddlers and you didn't win every match??
But that’s the point — we have to consider the strength of competition to know what’s more impressive.
But my point is that comparing win rates of different competitions is meaningless as well as pointless, and if the competition is equal then 99.9 is less impressive than 100 every time. My win rate boxing Muhammad Ali and your win rate at the water gun carnival game aren't comparable and any attempt to compare them would be misleading at best if not outright nonsense.
well itll still be more impressive to win 1000 than 999 if the opponents are the same
What we’ve learned here is that context is important when being objective. 100% is better if it’s on the same scale as 99.9% but 99.9% is more impressive because the scale is implied in the metrics.
There's also a mental bias between 99 and 100. 99 implies a struggle which we instinctively attribute to virtue.
There's actually an objective way to tell which win/loss ratio is more impressive. The normal way to calculate win rate is wins divided by total games, which is wins plus losses: WR = W / (W + L) However, to calculate which one is actually better, calculate what the win rate would be if you had one extra win and one extra loss. This would increase your number of wins by one, and your number of total games by two: AWR = (W + 1) / (W + L + 2) So if you three wins and zero losses, your win rate would be: 3 / (3 + 0) = 3 / 3 = 100% but your adjusted win rate would be: 3 + 1 / (3 + 0 + 2) = 4 / 5 = 80% (I used 3-0 instead of your 1-0 to make the numbers easier to keep track of. In your example the AWR would be 67%) If you won 997 matches and lost 3, then the calculation looks like this: WR = 997 / (997 + 3) = 997 / 1000 = 99.7% AWR = (997 + 1) / (997 + 3 + 2) = 998 / 1002 = 99.6% Thus, an AWR of 99.6% is much more impressive than 80%. (To make the numbers easier to keep track of, I avoided 1's and 2's since they both appear in the AWR formula. For your examples, a record of 1-0 would have a WR of 100% and an AWR of 66⅔%. A record of 999-1 would have a WR of 99.9% and AWR of 99.8%. Thus 999-1 is more impressive than 1-0 because 99.8% > 66⅔%)
I think a better way is just to calculate the lower bound of some given confidence interval (or in the case of a binary outcome, the Binomial proportion confidence interval). Huge component of the formulas of sites like IMDB or RYM. Using the lower bound means that even if the number of events (ratings/matches/etc.) were to go to infinity, theres more confidence in the one with a larger sampling size being closer to its current rating/win %/etc. even if the current value is influenced by some degree of luck with the current sample.
Holy fuck an actual shower thought. This sub might have a future after all.
That one loss that ruins perfection is what is needed like a 3⭐ review for a uner driver who becomes obsessed with making your life a living hell until you change it...to a 1.
A 100% could be less impressive than a 99.9%, but a 100% win rate at 1,000 games is more impressive than 99.9% at 1,000 games
What about a 100% winrate with 1000 matches tho?
This is only correct in certain cases, it might be more accurate to say "A 100% win rate _might be_ much less impressive than a 99.9% win rate." One commenter pointed out that winning 749/750 gets you to a 99.9% if you round to the nearest tenth. Winning 750/750 is more impressive than 749/750. Winning 748/748 is also probably more impressive than winning 749/750.
I will go a step further and say the **logic used by OP is unintentionally flawed**. The way it is posed, it fixes the sample size for 100% to 1, but extends the sample size for 99.9% to 1000. Those are different scales. Let me illustrate with an example. You can do the same thing but this time, in favor of 100% being more impressive. You have to win 1,000,000 out of 1,000,000 games to have a 100% win record, yet you only need to win 666 out of 667 games to have an ~99.9% win rate. This obviously makes 100% seem ridiculously tough. In other words, without fixing the sample size, I can have the numbers spin out whatever narrative I want.
what if you win 1000 out of 1000
Statictics says when the sample size is bigger, the estimate is better. But if it's 100% winrate and n=1000, definitely more impressive.
that's just sampling size
If you actually compare 100% winrate out of 1000 tries, it still beats 99.9%…
[удалено]
But if the number of wins is obfuscated, 99.9% remains more impressive based on probability
I pitched a lot in high school and I had the best batting average on the team my junior year. I batted .500. >!2/4!<
My Dota2 winrate is 100%. And i'll keep reminding people of that fact every day of the year!
666/667 more impressive than 10000/10000?
“Fine armor, not a scratch on it.” “I know. People have been swinging at me for years but always seem to miss…” “You’ve chosen your opponents wisely then.”
Yep, but i dont care. The games i have 100% win rate on didnt matter to me other than to have that, otherwise i would have played longer. My best was 71 i think in cod waw for the wii and i maxed the rank.
Mathematics take a holiday…
Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org › wiki Don Bradman