50/50
 

I recently had a debate with someone on this topic...

The debate consisted of the idea that someone skydiving with one parachute has a 50/50 chance of that device working vs it not working.. That was my arguement.(please dont talk of reserve parachutes as this was not included)

The other debator said that it was not 50/50 because parachutes were designed to work 100% of the time which makes it impossible for it to be a 50/50 event.

I understood his statistcal standpoint however my argument was that for one person not based of how often these devices open or fail it is a 50\50 chance by either working or not.

Much like flipping a quarter to me... It could land on heads 8 out of ten times but its still 50/50.

Please post your thoughts. I will only debate not going to be a jerk.

But what about the reserve parachute?

Early nomination for Most Logical and Well-Reasoned Thread of the Year.

So you're getting the 50/50 chance from that fact that it can only work or not work, right?

no, it's not 50/50, cause the idea as I understand it, is that you pull a chord, a rope or whatever, that pulls with it the parachute...so the only chance not to open is when their is a malfunction...so it's not 50/50...

Thread over... I didnt want to base it per a parachutes average of opening or closing just that it will do one or the other but that is not is going to happen here. Your going to give me the numbers...

Per person not per parachute, you see statisically parachutes open 99.8% thats understood. However if you go the route your planning on taking surell you have break everything down into a percentage.

I am just basically stating that if you have 1 chance to pull the release and have one chute.

Well I dont know the stats but I can safely presume that parachutes do not fail 50% of the time. For arguments sake lets say parachutes fail 10% of the time. You are basically arguing that that 10% would not be important to the individual relying on it to open, right?

Say it had been proven that parachutes fail only 10% of the time and will therefore fail on 1 in 10 people then it seems logical to say that the odds are not 50/50 because that would mean that 5 would fail in every 10.

However this is irrelevant the way I see it. The stats are worthless to that one isolated individual. The parachute can only open or not open. There are only two possible outcomes. It's 50/50.

I could've swore that's what I just said.

It's not 50/50, you seem to be caught up on the idea that it'll either happen or it won't but that's far from making it a 50/50 scenario, sounds more like you're referring to it being a 100% chance it'll be one of those two. If it's 50/50, that means half the time it'd open, half it wouldn't, simple as that (what is this, kindergarten material?) and that would be implying half the people that go skydiving die, which I'm sure would make it illegal by now

Just because there are two possible outcomes does not mean that the probabilty of each is 50%. The number of outcomes have no relation to the probability of each. You people must have failed statistics.