Stats is quite entertaining because it reminds me of Year 10 maths where everyone collectively agreed that if you flip a coin four times and get Heads every single time, Tails is somehow "due."

Probability of Bird Poop

A classic urban myth goes something like this:

If a bin chicken drops "heavy assets" onto your forehead (like a LinkedIn B2B sales specialist), what is the probability of getting hit a second time?

Most people would wipe their brow, shrug, and say:

"Welp, at least that’s out of the way! Mathematically speaking, the odds of getting hit twice in a lifetime are practically zero!"

I have no idea who convinced the general public of this, because every bird encounter is an independent event. The digestive tract of a bin chicken hovering over North Terrace today does not communicate with the seagull stalking your hot chips tomorrow.

latex (rendered)
P(A∩B)=P(A)⋅P(B)P(A \cap B) = P(A) \cdot P(B)

Congrats! You just reinvented the Gambler's Fallacy.

1% Chance of becoming a girl

Consider the canonical internet dilemma that periodically circulates through Discord servers at 3:00 AM:

Will you push this button? 99% chance of $1,000,000 / 1% chance of becoming a girl.

Most guys look at this and go:

"bro, I'm a very cis dude, I'm just gonna smash this button 50 times, walk away with $50,000,000." 🥚

Let p=0.01p = 0.01 be the probability of triggering the gender swap on any single press. The probability of surviving a single press without transforming is:

latex (rendered)
q=1−p=0.99q = 1 - p = 0.99

Because each press is an independent Bernoulli trial, the probability of surviving nn consecutive presses without transforming is qnq^n:

  • 1 press: 0.991=99.0%0.99^1 = 99.0\% chance you remain a boy.
  • 10 presses: 0.9910≈90.4%0.99^{10} \approx 90.4\% chance. (Still feeling confident).
  • 50 presses: 0.9950≈60.5%0.99^{50} \approx 60.5\% chance. (Sweating slightly).
  • 69 presses: 0.9969≈49.9%0.99^{69} \approx 49.9\% chance.
  • 100 presses: 0.99100≈36.6%0.99^{100} \approx 36.6\% chance.
  • 500 presses: 0.99500≈0.65%0.99^{500} \approx 0.65\% chance. 🎀

If you press the button infinite times:

latex (rendered)
lim⁡n→∞(1−p)n=0  ⟹  lim⁡n→∞P(Girl)=1.0\lim_{n \to \infty} (1 - p)^n = 0 \quad \implies \quad \lim_{n \to \infty} P(\text{Girl}) = 1.0

As your financial greed approaches infinity, the probability of avoiding that 1% outcome collapses to absolute zero.

Congrats, you just invented cumulative probability.

If you keep spamming the button to fund your custom homelab server rack, you are mathematically guaranteed to end up sitting in your apartment wearing an oversized pastel hoodie, staring at an incomprehensibly large bank balance.

Monkeys, Dadaism, and Combinatorial Violence

This is the exact mechanic behind the Infinite Monkey Theorem. Given infinite time and a mechanical typewriter, a chimpanzee hitting random keys will eventually type out Shakespeare’s Hamlet, followed immediately by the entire Linux kernel source code and a scathing critique of your lifestyle choices.

It is the same logic the Dadaists stumbled into during the 1920s: Tristan Tzara cutting words out of a newspaper, dumping them into a top hat, shaking the hat, and pulling them out one by one to create "poetry." Statistically speaking, if you shake that hat long enough, you will eventually reconstruct the Australian Constitution or a receipt from a 2014 Woolworths midnight run.

Want to feel cosmic vertigo? Pick up a standard 52-card deck and shuffle it thoroughly.

The total number of possible permutations of that deck is:

latex (rendered)
52!=80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,00052! = 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000

That is roughly 8.06×10678.06 \times 10^{67}.

For scale, there are approximately 105010^{50} atoms in the entire planet Earth. Every single time you properly shuffle a deck of cards, it is virtually guaranteed that that exact sequence of 52 cards has never existed in the history of human civilisation or the observable universe, and will never exist again until the heat death of the cosmos.

Yet people take one look at MBTI personality tests or Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions and go:

"Ah yes, 8 billion distinct human consciousnesses can definitely be bucketed into 16 discrete psychological archetypes based on a 20-question Buzzfeed-tier survey."

The ecological fallacy is laughing at us from the rafters.

The worst tutoring ad I've ever seen

150

There are so many layers that I don't even know where to start:

  1. The IQ Claim: The author advertises an IQ of 153.

    • Standardised psychometric tests (like the WAIS-IV) are normed with μ=100\mu = 100 and σ=15\sigma = 15.
    • An IQ of 153 represents a score +3.53σ+3.53\sigma above the mean.
    • That places you in the top 0.02%0.02\% of the global human population—roughly 1 in every 5,000 people.
    • At that altitude, standard psychometric tests hit the ceiling effect: the standard error of measurement balloons, and the test literally runs out of discriminative power. Claiming a precise score of "153" on a public noticeboard is psychometrically meaningless chest-thumping.

  2. The Curriculum Scope:

    • This self-proclaimed top 0.02% galactic megamind, blessed with a 153 IQ, has decided to deploy their cosmic intellect to tutor... Maths up to Year 9. 💀
    • You possess an Einstein-tier intellect and your operational domain caps out at solving 2x+5=152x + 5 = 15 and explaining what a hypotenuse is to a 14-year-old?

I guess this operates on the exact same logic that drives Nigerian Prince / 419 email scams. If a scammer writes a grammatically flawless, sophisticated phishing email, intelligent people will reply, waste three weeks of the scammer's time asking for legal verification, and bail out before sending money. That yields a terrible return on investment.

Much like how these scam emails were intentionally written with horrific grammar, spelling mistakes, and absurd premises; I suppose the flyer also operates on what they call Cormac Herley's Theory / Reverse Bayesian Filter:

text
                  [ Anyone Reading the Noticeboard ]
                                  │
          ┌───────────────────────┴───────────────────────┐
          ▼                                               ▼
[ Understands Basic Stats & Spelling ]         [ Impressed by "153 IQ" ]
          │                                               │
          ▼                                               ▼
  Laughs, walks away,                           Calls the number immediately,
  wastes 0 minutes of tutor's time.             hands over $40/hr to have their
                                                Year 7 kid taught long division.

If you understand standard deviations, you walk past the flyer. If you don't know what σ\sigma means and you think MENSA is a prestigious guild of sorcerers rather than a $90/year subscription fee for people who like Sudoku puzzles, you pull out your phone and dial the number.

Perhaps it's not bad advertising; it's a perfectly calibrated, mathematically optimal self-filtering funnel.