"Where **statistics becomes complicated, and fails us, is when we have distributions that are not symmetric**, like the urn above. "**If there is a very small probability of finding a red ball in an urn dominated by black ones, then our knowledge about the absence of red balls will increase very slowly**—more slowly than at the expected square root of n rate. On the other hand, our knowledge of the presence of red balls will dramatically improve once one of them is found. **This asymmetry in knowledge is not trivial**; it is central in this book—it is a central philosophical problem for such people as [[David Hume|Hume]] and [[Karl Popper]]" --- **Tags** -- [[quotes]], [[fooled-by-randomness]], [[probabilistic-thinking]], [[statistics]], [[data-analytics]], [[making-decisions]], [[probability-distributions]], [[asymmetric-distributions]] **Source** -- [[202410121132 - B - Fooled by Randomness]]