40 People Share Things That Have Happened That Are So Rare They Seem Almost Impossible (New Photos)
The mod shared his thoughts on probability and rare events seen seemingly “everywhere”. “If you look at probability through the lens of a bell curve (and one could argue that a bell curve isn’t representative here, but if we were), then the unlikely events are the values outlier stats you see at either end of the curve with very little chance of happening, but get ‘airtime’ and visibility because they’re actually rare,” they told Bored Panda.
According to them, even though rare events seem to be seen “everywhere”, they are actually only a fraction of the total events that take place” but do so in front of users to be “consumed” because they are, in fact, rare.”
Meanwhile, another moderator, u/Hats_Hats_Hats, added that perspective matters a lot when thinking about odds and rarity.
“If you shuffle a deck of 52 playing cards, the arrangement you get is one in about 80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000′ C’000. so is super unlikely if you look at it that way. But it’s also kind of trivial, which is why we’d remove a post that’s right. “I shuffled this deck of cards and the result I got will never happen again,” they said.