“
Winwood
Reade is good upon the subject,” said Holmes. “He remarks that,
while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he
becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never
foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision
what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but
percentages remain constant. So says the statistician. But do I see a
handkerchief? Surely there is a white flutter over yonder.”
We
can say the topic of this text is the application of Law of Large
Numbers to human behaviour. And this is precisely the aim that many
Social Sciences are dreaming of, in order to achieve prestige.
You
cannot foretell what you will get when you flip a coin once, but
thanks to this law, you can indeed delimit the number of heads or
tails if you throw it 5000 times.
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