The Mathematical Basis for Hope, Explained by an Idiot
Had lunch with a bunch of people today, and the economy came up and we seem to have settled on a phrase to describe the situation, because I hear it all the time: "It's bad." But I have some thoughts to offer.
I'm kind of a dunce about math—my mom may have dropped me on the math-learning side of my head when I was little—but there's a concept called "regression toward the mean" that I think can help us stay the course. I won't use the math terms, because if I do, I'll probably run the risk described by the writer John Gierach of sounding like a 14-year-old boy talking about women. But the basic idea is that if you do well on a test one day, you're likely to do a little worse the next time you take the same test, and if you do poorly you're likely to do a little better.
The Wikipedia article is written by someone who seems—I wouldn't know for sure—to actually know a lot about math and who warns against all sorts of ways you can misunderstand this. But I choose to believe that if a series of quite hideous things happens to you in a short time, the laws of mathematics which govern the universe are working to draw the circumstances of your life back toward the middle. This will not work as strongly for you if you're a big screwup. But all things being equal, it's something to sustain you when you have a run of bad luck. So hang in there! Which you should do anyway, of course. Whatever's going on, you're likely to muddle through. Ups and downs, ya know?
I'm kind of a dunce about math—my mom may have dropped me on the math-learning side of my head when I was little—but there's a concept called "regression toward the mean" that I think can help us stay the course. I won't use the math terms, because if I do, I'll probably run the risk described by the writer John Gierach of sounding like a 14-year-old boy talking about women. But the basic idea is that if you do well on a test one day, you're likely to do a little worse the next time you take the same test, and if you do poorly you're likely to do a little better.
The Wikipedia article is written by someone who seems—I wouldn't know for sure—to actually know a lot about math and who warns against all sorts of ways you can misunderstand this. But I choose to believe that if a series of quite hideous things happens to you in a short time, the laws of mathematics which govern the universe are working to draw the circumstances of your life back toward the middle. This will not work as strongly for you if you're a big screwup. But all things being equal, it's something to sustain you when you have a run of bad luck. So hang in there! Which you should do anyway, of course. Whatever's going on, you're likely to muddle through. Ups and downs, ya know?
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: The Mathematical Basis for Hope, Explained by an Idiot.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://blog.mattfreemanwriter.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/322
Leave a comment