Sample Size Matters

One 2003 ski trip. 50 mates. Plenty of dickheadery. And a warning about forming strong opinions from weak evidence. In this episode of The Fink Tank, Col and I talk about the beautiful human habit of overthinking the anecdote and underthinking the maths. About how we love to build worldviews from tiny, noisy data points, and then swear they’re true. Humans are notoriously poor at assessing probability, sample size, and causation. Where your business is concerned, this is probably costing you. What can we do about it? I loved revisiting this old footage which is somehow TWENTY TWO YEARS OLD. This episode is actually two years old itself! A 9 minute version was sitting unused in the folder for season 1. So I gave it a trim and added the ski trip footage. We haven’t changed a bit.