If you took a statistics course in your life, you might know that a flip of a coin does not yield heads or tails 50% of the time until you’ve flipped a coin ~9,604 times (assuming a 1% margin of error). That’s insane.

Let’s assume you flip a coin twice. One flip yields heads and the other tails. Suppose someone says that you’ll flip heads 50% of the time based on what your two flips. Well that’s wrong. If you figure out the standard error, you’ll discover that yes, a person might flip heads 50% of the time — plus or minus 69.4%. That 69.4% represents a tremendous amount of uncertainty.

Why care about any of this? Because it’s probably worth increasing skepticism towards claims and allowing for margin of error. And that’s advisable because not accounting for the margin of error and being skeptical for sake of skepticism may cause you to reject useful claims and ideas.

At the same time, I do not suggest you reject the things you see. I try not to invalidate my own experiences. Instead, I try to interpret what I see through a lens of likelihood. A silly example: “How certain am I that the person cut me off in traffic just to get under my skin?” You would need to survey the driver who cut you off and a thousand plus more drivers to become reasonably certain. Instead, I prefer to quantify my ignorance: “I’m not even 5% certain that was the cause, I am 100% certain that it’s on me to get over it.”

Model your ignorance with confidence…. more or less of the time.