YouTube:
I have always thought that sex ed and statistics should be the same course. There's no better way to show how vital stats is to your every day life than to look at statistics. Probabilities are so easy to misunderstand, and there are a lot that go into understanding the outcomes of sexual activity.
There's a ton I didn't get into here...like that a common trap is that, in a pinch, one might have unprotected sex with no negative outcome, and that makes it /feel/ much safer for future times. Which, I think, is a common trap people fall into.
There's also the fact that a 2% chance sounds pretty tiny, but it really does mean that, on average, if you have 50 couples using condoms perfectly, one of them is going to get pregnant in any given year. That's gonna seem weird and surprising and improbable and unfair to that couple, but statistically, it's exactly what we expected. Probabilities eventually collapse into reality, and then that couple no longer has a 2% chance of probability, they have a 100% chance, because they're pregnant, and everyone else has a 0% chance.
Being one of the two percent isn't that weird.
1 Comment
MilkmanDansays...As someone who went through 2 rounds of sex ed -- through my family's church (better than you think, but not by much), and public school (worse than you think; mostly consisting of "here's a picture of a dick with gonorrhea, LOOK AT IT"), it seems like videos like this available through YouTube are likely to be a massive improvement on practical sex ed. So kudos to the consistently awesome Green brothers for figuring that out and doing something about it!
However, I would point out a misleading bit in the YT text:
"Probabilities eventually collapse into reality, and then that couple no longer has a 2% chance of probability, they have a 100% chance, because they're pregnant, and everyone else has a 0% chance."
...Yeah, not really. That couple is still subject to the 2% probability, they just happen to be one of the statistically (mildly) unlikely examples that make the chance 2% instead of 0. And much more importantly, everyone else still has a 2% chance, not a 0% chance.
Misunderstanding statistics / probability in that way leads to all kinds of erroneous assumptions and behavior. Like putting a huge bet on red + even in roulette because the past 5 hits have been black + odd and red + even is "due". Or driving around with no seat belt because someone you know was just in an accident, thereby biting the "statistical bullet" and making everybody else safe for a while. Every roll of the dice is a new event with the same odds as the roll before it.
Discuss...
Enable JavaScript to submit a comment.