![]() ![]() It’s a pretty ubiquitous part of contemporary conversation, right? This unintentional verbal tick is designed to soften whatever idea you just asserted-it flatters listeners by letting them know that you think they understood what you just said and encourages them toward your side of the conversation by making it seem like they are already agreeing with you. Something particularly conspicuous is how often we hear the word right at the end of our favorite data journalists’ spoken sentences. Very similar phenomena are afoot in podcasting. This kind of uncertainty is fundamentally different from raw odds, in that it is dependent on more than just chance, and is the sort of uncertainty that statisticians try to capture when they talk about margins of error and confidence intervals. Given a particular throw, then, you’re not sure if that quarterback is having a good day or a bad day. Let’s imagine this quarterback is talented but inconsistent: In half of his games, he completes 30 percent of his throws, but in the other half, he completes 70 percent. ![]() But, we can also look at the variation around those odds. Odds are therefore 1 in 2 that his next pass will be completed. Lets say a quarterback has recently completed half of his passes. We can also use this kind of uncertainty to talk about how likely a quarterback is to complete a pass. These odds reflect your uncertainty about the suit of a random card. ![]() If a quarter of the cards in your deck are spades, there’s a 1 in 4 chance that some randomly plucked card is a spade. In poker, when you’re uncertain about which card will be dealt next, your uncertainty comes from the fact that there are a bunch of possible outcomes-a bunch of possible cards-randomly distributed in the deck. ![]()
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