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Akos Komuves's avatar

This was interesting Michał, thanks for sharing your story.

I like this topic because I learned a bit about statistics and probability.

It also made me recall something I'm dealing with right now while helping a friend.

In general, I try to stay away from wondering about what could have happened if this or that happened in the past. Learning from some recent medical complications and trying to recover from them, fantasizing about the different possible outcomes didn't help.

Let's say someone had an operation and now things are settled and they are recovered, but the operation also had a long-term effect, let's say it is a scar. They are bothered by the scar and think about alternative realities where a million things that now function in their body correctly, still do, they are well but the scar isn't there.

I see this as an example of the conjunction fallacy. There are simply too many things that had to be in a specific way to end up healthy and recovered. And thinking that "oh yeah, but if I could just flip that switch in the past" and get the same results, I think that's misleading because of the immense number of variables.

Thanks for the mention!

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Suresh Choudhary's avatar

Great article and as always great job connecting it back to working in tech. I have 2 thoughts about Regression to the Mean:

1. It's pretty hard to know or measure your mean.

2. Your mean could trend up.

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