Episode 21: Whores and Baldness
In which we discuss what exactly entails promiscuity and athletic endeavor.
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Tarang, I’m not too sure about your statistics on STDs. Maybe I misunderstood you, but it sounded to me like you were claiming that no matter how many girls you sleep with, you have the same odds of have gotten an STD. It is totally true that your chance of getting an STD from the next girl stays the same (from girl to girl to girl), but you definitely have a better chance of getting an STD from 10 girls than you do from one girl.
Think of a lottery where each ticket gives you one in a million chance to win. Does buying an additional lottery ticket help? Of course! Now you have 2 in a million chances. If you buy all the lotto tickets, you have a 100% chance of winning.
Just like if you sleep with all the girls without STDs + 1, you have a 100% chance of … well, sleeping with a girl with an STD. So buy a lot of condoms!
I’m actually interested in hearing Alfonso’s original theory – perhaps you guys can revisit this for your next podcast!
THATS WHAT I THOUGHT!
-Alfonso
See this wikipedia article (which we know is truth):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability#Mathematical_treatment
I believe this falls in to the “non mutually exclusive events” category. As a simple example, if your probability for some event A is 10%, the probability of A occurring at least once out of 2 times is:
P(A or B) = P(A) + P(B) – P(A and B) or
P(A or A) = 2 * P(A) – P(A)^2
If you run this a number of iterations, you’ll see it approximates 100%, but never quite gets there:
0.1 + 0.1 – (0.1*0.1) = 0.19
0.19 + 0.19 – (0.19*0.19) = 0.3439
= 0.56953279
= 0.8151
= 0.965775
= 0.998775
= 0.999998499375
Ok, I have too much time on my hands.
Interesting. Looks like the main false assumption I made was that the two events were mutually exclusive