Most have heard of Pascal’s wager, but have you heard of the thought experiment known as Pascal’s mugging? The mugging attempts to reframe the essence of the wager argument using only finite values, thereby getting around some standard objections to the wager argument. ...
In a first semester probability course, students encounter combinatorics and point estimates such as the mean and median of a data set. A common example is the low odds of winning the lottery. When discussing the topic of point estimates, students are exposed to the idea of a “fair bet” or “fair game” - one in which the expected value of the random variable associated with the game is equal to the cost of participation or zero, depending on if a fixed cost is included in the game or tracked separately. This year, the Mega Millions had a jackpot in excess of one billion dollars. This had me thinking - mathematically, this is likely a fair game. But I still would expect to loose out playing it. In this article, I want to explore this idea further using the Mega Millions lottery as a particular example. ...
A look at the distribution of age at death based on social security mortality tables to see how long we can expect to be in retirement for.