What’s a completely useless fact you love sharing?
Did you know that you’re more likely to be murdered on any given day in Australia than to win the Powerball jackpot? It’s true. And before you start worrying, both are extraordinarily unlikely.
The odds of winning Division 1 in Powerball with a single game are approximately 1 in 134 million. Meanwhile, based on Australian homicide statistics, your average chance of being a homicide victim on any particular day is roughly 1 in 35 million. That makes you nearly four times more likely to be killed than to win Powerball.
Now, I don’t spend my days worrying about being murdered. And I’m certainly not going to start buying Powerball tickets in the hope of becoming fabulously wealthy.
So what do I do with this information? Absolutely nothing. It’s not the sort of thing that you share at a dinner party. But I still find it fascinating.
Perhaps the interesting thing isn’t the statistics at all. It’s the way we think about probability.
We can be frightened by things that are extraordinarily unlikely, while remaining optimistic about other things that are even less likely. Our fears and hopes don’t always pay much attention to the odds.
I suppose that’s part of being human. We’re not always as rational as we like to think.
And there’s another completely useless fact worth remembering.
What’s a completely useless fact you love sharing?
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