Quote from james_bond_3rd:
I yielded because at that time you were still polite and graceful. And you were not as completely wrong as I thought you were. If others were using the same definition, I certainly should not fault you for using it. But it remains true that to this day you still don't understand what a null hypothesis is. In fact, you don't even understand what it was that we were debating.
Now your facade of gracefulness has all disappeared, there is no reason for me to still give you the benefit of doubt.
I tell you what. Let us get some noted authorities on probability theory. Let them review what your wrote about the null hypothesis after your wrote this and see if they request your resignation from the Stats dept.
As you stated here is your original post:
(the relevant part):
"Here is a good analogy. Once I asked one of my military friends what he considered as a great general. His answer was that if someone won five major battles in a row then he would be considered a great general. Then I asked what he thought the percentage of great generals were among all the generals in history. He thought about it for awhile, and then answered, "maybe 3%."
I laughed. If you flip coins 5 straight times, the chance of 5 straight heads is 3%! So were these 3% really great generals, or were they just lucky?
As a feeble human, I don't think we will ever know the answer to that question. Then why I am against the ID theory? Because it's worse. Not only it won't bring anything to the table as far as our knowledge goes, it prevents scientific thinking. It makes us lazy, makes us less likely to question our own thinking, less likely to challenge false observation. All of this are harmful to science."
And here is a statistics lesson for you:
The chance of winning one battle, everything else being equal (ie you're not better than your opponent) is 50%. That's random chance. That means if you had 100 generals fighting 50 battles, 50 of these generals would win (any surprise here?). The chance of winning two such battles in a row, is half that, at 25%. Take these same 100 generals, ask them to fight in another set of 50 battles, 25 of them would win twice in a row. The chance of winning three in a row, is yet another half, at 12.5%. Four in a row, at 6.25%. Five in a row, at 3.125%, or approximately 3%. So if people just randomly picked their battles, and randomly won a few and lost a few, then 3% of them would have won five in a row (and 3% of them would have lost five in a row, completely because of bad luck).
Do I need to explain it sloowwwwly again for you?
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Your were fooled by the book fooled by randomness.
You now suspect randomness under every corner.
You have a complete lack of understanding of how to apply probabilistic thinking to real life or trading.
Just because results resemble the result you get from a coin flip does not mean the exercise was the product of random chance.
