If someone has a success rate of 90%, they fail twice as often as someone who has a success rate of 95% (10 times per 100 vs 5 times per 100) If someone has a success rate of 98% they fail twice as often as someone who has a success rate of 99% (2 times per 100 vs 1). Why is this the same?

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If someone has a success rate of 90%, they fail twice as often as someone who has a success rate of 95% (10 times per 100 vs 5 times per 100) If someone has a success rate of 98% they fail twice as often as someone who has a success rate of 99% (2 times per 100 vs 1). Why is this the same?

In: Mathematics

4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Alright so after additional reflection on the given feedback, I’ve realized the specific relationship I was looking for (and I have no idea why this didn’t occur to me initially) is that in both instances, the difference in failure rate is doubling.

If you’re successful 90% of the time, you fail 10%. If you’re successful 95% of the time, you fail 5%.

If you’re successful 99% of the time, you fail 1%. If you’re successful 98% of the time, you fail 2%.

Similarly, if you have a success rate of 60% you fail twice as often as someone who has a success rate of 80%.

The relationship between the differences of 99%-98%, 95%-90%, and 80%-60% is that the rate of failure between the two is doubled. For some reason my brain didn’t intuitively pick up on that.

Anonymous 0 Comments

That’s not actually the case if you’re looking at present tense as its just a probability. If this is past tense (had a success rate of…) then the times that they failed is doubled. (1 out of 20 compared to 2 out of every 20, and 1 out of 100 to 2 out of every 100 attempts)

Anonymous 0 Comments

Here are those same numbers a different way: If there are 100 cookies and you eat 1 then sometime else was 2, they ate twice as many.
If you eat 5 and they eat 10, they have eaten twice as many again.

Doubling large numbers is bigger than doubling small numbers

Anonymous 0 Comments

X times 2= 2x

2 times 5 = 10

2 times 1 = 2