Whether I'm jaded, practical, cynical, realistic, or some other synonym, I'm not sure--I don't know whether or not you're really capable of making an objective call like that about yourself. What I can say for sure is that I harbour very few illusions about the world. I see it for what it is, even when I end up not taking it seriously or making it the butt of a lot of silly jokes. It doesn't take very long for new acquaintances to realize that it's all a front for a very guarded outlook.
What it comes down to is that I have very few wide-eyed illusions about the world, especially--perhaps most strongly--when it comes to odds.
I am not a mathematician. I have no formal--or informal--background in statistics. I know absolutely nothing about the numbers and wouldn't be able to calculate them in any useful way even if I did. So my conclusions aren't borne of a deep academic understanding of the subject but rather realistic application.
The thing about odds and statistics is that they sometimes mean different things on paper then they represent in the real world. All but the most infinitesimally small of chances is really much more common in terms of pure numbers than we're inclined to think. Take, for example, a percentage as small as 1%. A single percent isn't in the long run very statistically significant--when you hear it you automatically assume it isn't very likely but upon further investigation isn't actually the case. For one thing 1% is one in 100. For every 1000, that adds up to ten people. In a population of one million, a number that seems much bigger than it actually turns out to be in the real world, just one percent is a thousand. One thousand. That's a lot of people--about the number of friends and acquaintances you know all together right now.
Even smaller odds turn out to be much better than most people realize. One in a million? The world's population right now is estimated at seven billion. One out of a million of that is seven thousand people--more than twice the number of people you have ever met or ever will meet. Over 300 of those are in the United States alone. On paper, one in a million is pretty shitty. In reality it's still a fairly substantial number.
But even given this I have no fantasies or illusions. I know what the odds mean for me, even when I know their larger likelihood. I don't play the lottery or other games of chance and I look down on people who do so--particularly those who keep playing long after it's clear they are not going to get anywhere. This isn't due to the fact that I understand the odds. I didn't understand them until I was much older. No, the reason I started to feel this way was due to something that happened when I was in high school.
My freshman year I ended up in detention for some infraction--I don't remember what I did but I was probably fighting or something--and served it in a science teacher's classroom. Among the various displays and models in the classroom was a clear plastic gallon-sized jar like the kind that Utz-brand pretzels come in, with the screw-on lid glued down. It was about 3/4 full of tiny round plastic beads like those non-perelle sprinkles you find on cookies and Sno-Cap candies. There were a million of these little plastic balls, and I know this because there was a square of paper taped to the side of the jar that said how many there were and broke down the contents of the jar. (It was also homemade, meaning the teacher who owned it would have had to count the entire thing out by hand--which must have been frustratingly time-consuming.)
The overwhelming majority of them were blue--something like 95% of them--were blue. Almost the whole jar. The rest was broken down something like the following, as best as I can remember: orange, red, green, pink, and white. There was one black bead--one single tiny black bead in a jar with 999,999 others. On in a million. The idea was to show just how difficult the odds of one in a million were. It was hard to even find a colour other than blue--forget finding the black one. Multiply that by the odds of, say, winning the lottery--twenty million and more--and you have a pretty good handle on just how remote the odds actually are.
Over the course of my high school years I had two science classes in the same classroom and every opportunity I got I would pick up that damn jar and look for that stupid black bead on the theory that one in a million meant I still stood an okay chance of succeeding. I fell into the common trap of assuming that I would do just that one time out of a million. That isn't true. It means that every time you try, the odds are one out of a million--doing it repeatedly doesn't change the odds. It's one in a million--and stays that way.
Even when I had no classes and no real business being in that room, I still went there and spent an inordinate amount of time with that jar looking for the black bead. I never once stopped. I never found it.
It turns out that one in a million is still pretty hard to achieve even if it still translates to 7000 people worldwide. In the end it left me permanently skeptical in face of the odds. Whatever they translate to on paper and no matter how much people (like my mother) cheerfully insist that my chances of winning are the same as everyone else's, it isn't worth my time to try. I might have the same odds as everyone else but everybody else still has shitty odds.
The odds as they exist on paper and in real terms are strikingly different.
Even chances that sound remote are usually, at least strictly according to the numbers, quite good--but ultimately the fickle hand of fate plays no favourites.
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