A Statistics Question for Nick Matzke

I am no statistician, but I use this type of reasoning all the time in my job as a student affairs professional in higher education. We assign our students a user name based on the first 2 letters of their first name and their last name along with a 4 digit number that corresponds to the last four digits of their student ID. This is their log-in for email, etc. Even though we may have multiple students in our system with the name of "John Williams", since we are a fairly large school, I can reasonably ascertain that "jowilliams2992" is going to be the John Williams that lives at 125 Strawberry Lane without having to go into further detailed searches. I am not sure if this example applies to this particular issue, but it tells me that our instinct is to use these probabilities in our daily lives to make important and reasonable decisions. The Materialist would have you believe that such instinctual logic is faulty since the likelihood of our being here is just as likely as our NOT being here.OldArmy94

December 16, 2013

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