katy-l-wood:gallusrostromegalus:squireofgeekdom:gallusrostromegalus:illustratedjai:fullyfunctionalmi
katy-l-wood:gallusrostromegalus:squireofgeekdom:gallusrostromegalus:illustratedjai:fullyfunctionalminiaturebeehive:rosslynpaladin:anais-ninja-bitch:likorys-shimenawa:authorbettyadams:This is the first time I’ve ever seen a public utility ruefully praise someone for property damage….I mean, you couldn’t plan it if you tried, so it’s a genuine accident. And also a freaky one - like throwing a coin and it landing on its side. craighead electric recognizes game.What’s crazy is this might not be the weirdest accidental shot I have seen.When you take up Archery, you shake Murphy by the hand. Your sense of what is or is not Probable is opened like a wrecking ball to the Third Eye.I have seen and managed a “robinhood” more than once. I’ve seen it happen like five times. It’s when you split your arrow by hitting the very end of it, dead on, with ANOTHER ARROW. Less than a square centimeter of target there. Just by total freak chance. Nearly impossible to do by trying but it HAPPENS all the time.“One in a million chances crop up nine times out of ten”- Guards! Guards!, Sir Terry Pratchett#take an archery course and a stats course at the same time and you may Ascend into levels unknownIf nothing else, due to losing your last tenuous hold on sanity because stats, and taking your newfound archery knowledge to live in the woods free of any society that has discovered the discipline of Statistics.The wild thing about the robinhooding is that the Mythbusters tried - in at least two separate episodes! - to create the perfect circumstances for a robinhooded arrow. They mechanised it, they got their equipment set up perfectly, they had the perfect arrows… and they just couldn’t do it. Meanwhile, at my first archery competition, I was watching the top level archers while my group was having a break, and i got to see first hand a robinhooded arrow happen. So every time i watch those episodes and watch the Mythbusters conclude that it’s impossible, I’m tearing my hair out because i have literally watched it happen. OK now I’m curious- Typically when people start expiriencing “This isn’t how statistics works” type-phenomena, it’s because we misunderstood how likely the event was in the first place and the factors that contribute to it.This would mean doing something like having everyone at an archery contest count how many shots they take that day and then comparing the total to the number of unusual shots- Perhaps robinhooding is not a one-in-a-million shot but it IS a one-in-one-thousand shot. I don’t know anything about archery but I am fond of math, so I thought i’d take a shot at this (ba dum tsh) This is all extremely back of the napkin, so I apologize for any errors.So according to this, a Western round involves shooting two sets of four dozen arrows, so 96 arrows. According to this, within the US alone 23.8 million adults practice archery and 20% of those do so competitively, so 4,760,000 people in the US alone shooting competitively. There are 50 competitions scheduled in the US for 2021 according to this, which we can assume is low due to the current State Of Affairs, but it doesn’t make sense to assume that every person competes in 50 competitions a year. If we say people who shoot competitively compete in an average of two competitions a year, that’s 4,760,000 people competing in 2 competitions a year shooting 96 arrows competitively at each competition, or 913,920,000 arrows shot competitively in a year. Even assuming robin hood-ing is a one in a million shot, we’d expect 913 robin hood shots in competition per year, or about 18 robin hood shots per competition. Even if we assume more conservatively that only half of people who shoot competitively compete in a given year and those who compete only participate in one competition on average a year, and we then assume on top of that only the top 10% of archers who shoot competitively are able to make a robin hood shot a one-in-a-million shot, that’s still 22,848,000 arrows shot by archers good enough to make a robin hood shot a one-in a million shot yearly, and with those one in a million odds, we’d expect 22 robin hood shots in competition per year, or at slightly less than half of the competitions. Even if it’s one in ten million, we’d still expect about 2 robin hood shots in competition yearly.So the real question isn’t ‘if a robin hood arrow is a one in a million chance, how did you see one at an archery competition?’ it’s ‘if a robin hood arrow is only a one in a million chance and not rarer, how would we not see more of them at archery competitions?’tl;dr extremely uncommon outcomes can happen with unintuitive frequency if the thing is done many many times by many people. AW YEAH, THIS IS MY SHIT.I’ve robinhooded an arrow twice, and my dad has done it about six times. The archery store we go to has a whole display of dozens of robinhooded arrows on the wall JUST from people who have done it while in the shop testing out new equipment/adjustments to their equipment. It’s honestly not all that uncommon. My dad actually actively tries to avoid it now because his arrows are expensive and he’s annoyed at accidentally destroying them. In related news: my sister can split a bullet on the head of an axe, so possibly it’s just a family trait to be scary accurate. -- source link