Winning V

 

The Winner Takes It All

The winner takes it all
The loser's standing small
Beside the victory
That's her destiny

Winning isn’t everything!

In any choice,   there is a 50% chance that you made one choice then there is a 50% chance that you made the other choice.  The problem is when you think that only your choice is right, i.e. 100%.  Actually it doesn’t work that way.  If you have humility, or tolerance, you are willing to concede that the choice that you did not make might be right.  In that case following the 50 million Frenchmen can’t be wrong, the wisdom of crowds, etc,  then you should want to know the variance of all choices.  You can be sure that 68% of all choices are within the mean choice, the odds, plus the square root of that variance.  This is the 68/95/99 rule of normal distributions.  It is also why the scientific standard is 3 Sigma which means that 99.97% of the observations are within three times the square root of the variance.

This sounds like complex math but it is not.  95% of the travel times have an on-time arrival which means that the mean time plus 2 times one square root of the variance is 95% of the means travel time, which means that there si an on time arrival 95% of the time.  (The idea of Joe Six Pack doing Square Roots in his head without thinking is mind boggling!)  If a verdict is Guilty or Not Guilty, a unanimous jury has only a 0.02% of occurring by accident.  IOW, a unanimous jury has a 99.98% chance of being correct, assuming that it was not lied during the presentation of evidence or that it was not biased to select a Not Guilty or Guilty verdict. IOW a unanimous jury is 3 sigma.

If the jury system follows statistical rules, and travelers follow statistical rules, then shouldn’t important decisions should just be better than the odds,  a simple majority.  The winner might take it all, but the winner does NOT speak for the group, only for himself.  Or, to use a quote from my favorite movie, Casablanca, when resolving the triangle of Rick-Ilsa-Victor, “If that plane leaves the ground and you're not with him, you'll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.” The winner in a contest of two, only takes the loser’s share, but unless the rest of the group already gave its share to the loser, that was NOT all.  We’ll always have Paris, and you can't take that away from me!