History Main / ArtisticLicenseStatistics

* Creator/JonBois invokes this in his video "The Search for the Saddest Punt in the World," where he creates a mathematical formula called "The Surrender Index" as a way of quantifying the cowardice of any given punt in the [[UsefulNotes/NationalFootballLeague NFL]]. By his own admission, the purpose of the formula is mostly just to demonstrate how much he hates it when teams punt the ball in situations where attempting a field goal or going for it would be a better option.
-->'''Jon''': Where is any of this derived from? It's derived from my dissatisfaction. It's a reflection of how I feel. I'm misusing algebra to throw a fit.

-->''Jon'': Where is any of this derived from? It's derived from my dissatisfaction. It's a reflection of how I feel. I'm misusing algebra to throw a fit.

* ''Literature/TheScienceOfDiscworld'' books have an arguably accurate but somewhat twisted take on statistics: the chances of ''anything at all'' happening are so remote that it doesn't make sense to be surprised at ''specific'' unlikely things.
** The ''{{Literature/Discworld}}'' books in general contains some variant of "A million to one chance comes up nine out of ten times." that comes up a few times in the books. Of course, this being the Discworld, it actually works. Note that, thanks to the properties of narrativium, it has to be ''exactly'' a million to one to work. 836,715-to-one are not the kind of odds you'd ever want to rely on despite them being almost 20% better than a million to one statistically.

* In the ''ComicBook/{{Asterix}}'' album ''The Soothsayer'', the Roman army has been ordered to round up all soothsayers. When soothsayer Prolix claims to be just a fake (which is true), a centurion tests him by making him predict a roll of two dice. Prolix guesses correctly ("7") but then argues that if he was a real soothsayer, he would never have bet on the number that would get him arrested. Since the chances of getting a "7" are 1/6, the test proves nothing at all.

* In the ''ComicBook/{{Asterix}}'' album ''The Soothsayer'', the Roman Empire tasks a centurion to round up all prophets and soothsayers in order to suppress pagan beliefs. A conman passing himself as a soothsayer gets caught and is given a test to see if he can predict a roll of two six-sided dice. He breathes a sigh a relief as he knows his luck is usually awful, and picks (stupidly, statistically speaking) seven, which just so happens to come up on the dice and "prove" him the real deal. He goes on an InsaneTrollLogic demonstration that he picked the right number ''because'' he can't tell the future. The centurion isn't convinced until the soothsayer mentions that the villagers believe anything he tells them, which makes the centurion offer to let them go if he convinces the villagers to leave.

* On ''Series/TheOReillyFactor'', Bill O'Reilly argued that life expectancy was lower in the US than in Canada because the US has ten times as many people, and therefore has ten times the [[http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200907270052 number of accidents.]]

* {{Discussed}}, {{subverted}}, and {{justified}} in ''Literature/TheWheelOfTime'' book ''Towers of Midnight,'' when Noal Charin points out to Mat Cauthon that rolling dice to determine which direction to go won't work, due to the higher likeliness of rolling odds than evens, and Mat counters that his magic luck means that it wouldn't be random, regardless.

** ''VideoGame/XCOMEnemyUnknown'' ditches this in favor of telling player straight how likely he is to hit. However, many players insist that the game cheats in favor of aliens on higher difficulties and Classic mode. This eventually got so bad, that the [[http://www.schwanenlied.me/yawning/XCOM/XCOMPRNG.html RNG was taken apart for testing]] by the community... and found to be 100% correct. As it turns out, on the lower difficulties the , the computer actually cheat for the ''player''. Thus, once the aid is removed on the higher difficulties, players feel cheated when their "sure" shots no longer hit all the time.

*** A major note of irony to all this is that fans will often claim the RNG in older games or post-''Fates'' games is "cheating", when it's entirely fair in the former case and at least far closer to reality in the latter case. A character missing two 80% hits and then getting hit by a 20% hit sounds reasonable at first, but in a fair system, that's only a 1/125 chance of happening: unlikely, sure, but when there are dozens of rounds of combat every chapter, it's almost guaranteed to happen at some point. Meanwhile, in the case of the "2RN" system, that chance declines to around 1/1800.

* All ''VideoGame/FireEmblem'' games after the fifth display inaccurate hit/miss percentages. The game actually uses the average of two random numbers to determine a hit, so a 75% chance to hit is really 87.5%, while a 25% is actually a 12.75%. This system is likely in place to make [[FragileSpeedster dodging-type]] units evade more (and thus more viable) and high-accuracy characters strike more and lessens the chance that such a character dies ([[AntiFrustrationFeatures Due to permanent death and limited saving, this means restarting the entire level in most games]]) against all 3 of the random mooks that has a 2% chance to hit each. This system does tend to benefit the player, as their high powered heroes almost always have greater than 50% odds to hit, meaning the system results in them hitting more often than the displayed percent, while enemy mooks are much more likely to be in the sub-50% range, making them miss more often than they otherwise would.

* '''Naïve Combination of Probabilities''': Given the probabilities of two events, people will often simply either add them or multiply them. Generally speaking, calculating the combined probability is much more complicated. For example, suppose you roll a die twice. The probability of a six is 1/6 each time, so the probability of at least one six in two rolls must be 1/3, right?[[note]]It's actually 11/36, or about 31%. This is because of all the 36 possible options (1-1, 1-2, 1-3 etc...) only 11 contain the number 6. These are (1-6,2-6,3-6,4-6,5-6, their inverses, and 6-6 which only counts once and not twice, which is why the odds aren't 1/3 but instead 11/36. [[/note]]

* '''The Definition of Probability''': There's two ways probability can be defined. The first is what should happen in a random process ''in the long run''. The second is the degree of certainty with which a belief is held. The first definition applies to statements like, "The probability of rolling a six on a fair die are one in six." The second applies to statements like, "My favorite team will win this game." This difference can be very important. These two views are called frequentist and Bayesian, respectively.

* '''The hit/miss belief''': "A hit ratio below 25% is hopeless and a hit ratio above 75% is guaranteed. Everything else is a crapshoot." This stems from our evolved propensity and preference for quick decisions, so we often times round everything up and down, in this case to 100%, 50%, and 0%. Obviously 75% does not equal to 100% nor does 25% to 0%, but you'd be surprised how often people forget those were just crude approximations.

* '''The hit/miss belief''': "A hit ratio below 25% is hopeless and a hit ratio above 75% is guaranteed. Everything else is a crapshoot." This stems from our evolved propensity to and preference for quick decisions, so we often times round everything up and down, in this case to 100%, 50%, and 0%. Obviously 75% does not equal to 100% nor does 25% to 0%, but you'd be surprised how often people forget those were just crude approximations.

[[folder: Comic Books]]

--> "Even after studying statistics, all my knowledge and understanding of it goes out the window when I play Fire Emblem and I get mad at math not doing what I think is best for it."

* In Creator/LoisDuncan's ''Literature/AGiftOfMagic'', the psychic protagonist, Nancy, is given a standard test to detect telepathic abilities. She is asked to pick, without looking, all the white cards out of a deck of cards filled with an equal amount of black and white cards. Because she wishes to hide her ability, she picks all the black cards so that she would get all the "wrong" answers and fail the test. The examiner sees right through Nancy's ploy because there is an equal probability of picking only white or only black cards and explains that if she really wanted to screw up the test, she should have picked a roughly equal amount of black and white cards at random.

* All ''VideoGame/FireEmblem'' games after the fifth display inaccurate hit/miss percentages. The game actually uses the average of two random numbers to determine a hit, so a 75% chance to hit is really 87.5%, while a 25% is actually a 12.75%. This system is likely in place to make [[FragileSpeedster dodging-type]] units evade more (and thus more viable) and high-accuracy characters strike more and lessens the chance that such a character dies ([[AntiFrustrationFeatures Due to permanent death and limited saving, this means restarting the entire level in most games]]) against all 3 of the random mooks that has a 2% chance to hit each. This system does tend to benefit the player, as their high powered heroes almost always have great than 50% odds to hit, meaning the system results in them hitting more often than the displayed percent, while enemy mooks are much more likely to be in the sub-50% range, making them miss more often than they otherwise would.

** The ''{{Literature/Discworld}}'' books in general contains some variant of "A million to one chance comes up nine out of ten times." that comes up a few times in the books. Of course, this being the Discworld, it actually works.

* In the ''Series/OnlyFoolsAndHorses'' episode "[[Recap/OnlyFoosAndHorsesS2E03ALosingStreak A Losing Streak]]", Boycie refused to bet on a coin toss against Del because, having beaten Del in the previous few tosses, the "Laws of averages" dictated that he would likely lose this one. When Del suggested that Boycie challenged Rodney instead, he agreed!

* In ''Series/OnlyFoolsAndHorses'', Boycie refused to bet on a coin toss against Del because, having beaten Del in the previous few tosses, the "Laws of averages" dictated that he would likely lose this one. When Del suggested that Boycie challenged Rodney instead, he agreed!

* All ''VideoGame/FireEmblem'' games after the fifth display inaccurate hit/miss percentages. The game actually uses the average of two random numbers to determine a hit, so a 75% chance to hit is really 87.5%, while a 25% is actually a 12.75%. This system is likely in place to make [[FragileSpeedster dodging-type]] units evade more (and thus more viable) and high-accuracy characters strike more and lessens the chance that such a character dies ([[AntiFrustrationFeatures Due to permanent death and limited saving, this means restarting the entire level in most games]]) against all 3 of the random mooks that has a 2% chance to hit each. This system does tend to benefit the player, as their high powered heroes almost always have great than 50% odds to hit, meaning the system results in them hitting more often than the displayed percent, while enemy mooks are much more likely to be in the sub-50% range, making them miss more often than they otherwise wood.

* ''VideoGame/CrisisCoreFinalFantasyVII'' has the DMW, a slot-machine of various character faces that spins during combat, creating different effects. The only way to level-up is for three "7"s to align on the slots. While this looks like it's leveling based on total randomness, it isn't. The DMW is actually controlled by a complicated mathematical formula that manifests itself as a chance that always just so happens to work out exactly the way natural progression should. In essence, one-in-a-million chances succeed nine times out of ten in this game. Furthermore, while it's not shown anywhere in the game, enemies give experience when killed, increasing the odds of hitting the combination that gives Zack a level up. This means that you're eventually guaranteed to get the 7-7-7 combination that gives you a level up by defeating enough enemies.