All dialogue guaranteed overheard

Delivery guy talking to secretary in the medical office: “Seattle had a nice team but Pittsbugh was hungrier. That’s why they won.”

The sad thing is, probably many of our students would say the same thing, even after our attempted brainwashing of them in Stat 1111.

P.S. See chapter 1 of our book for some football data (courtesy of Hal Stern). The point differential has a distribution that is centered at the point spread with an sd of 14 points.

2 thoughts on “All dialogue guaranteed overheard

  1. It's the (insert good/bad cause here) syndrome. For example, if the stock market is up, even by a few points, you'll see the news state that it is up 'on news of X', where X isn't necessarily important, just some piece of good news. Similarly, if the market is down, even by a few points, the news will say 'down on news of Y', where Y is some piece of bad news. The originator's theory was that the guys writing the stories were merely grabbing the first piece of good/bad news to come out of the printer – actual or plausible causality was irrelevant.

    Similarly for sportwriting, where things like 'hungrier' are not very (dis)provable, except perhaps if the expected loser won.

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