What the heck is real life number
An actual measured data point, as opposed to a randomly generated number. Also this principle applies specifically to the first digit. Overall the title is a complete mess.
Basically, when you gather a bunch of data points about real world quantitative phenomena (e.g. town population, lake surface area, etc), you find this distribution curve of leading digits where 1 is something like 30% most frequent, gradually decreasing down to 9 being least frequent.
This is called Benford’s Law, it’s basically an emergent property about how orders of magnitude work. It’s useful because you can use it to detect fake data, since if your data faker doesn’t know about it they’ll generate fake data that looks random but doesn’t follow this distribution.
Great video on Benford’s Law here. Matt goes into a good amount of detail outlining why this occurs, why it doesn’t always apply, and what it means if data does/doesn’t follow the Law.
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This is used to catch tax fraud. People who forge reciepts tend to use random numbers, so they stand out as outliers, and they get caught that way.
Title needs some work. I would suggest:
TIL about Benfords law: In many real life data-sets the leading number is ‘1’ 30% of the time.
Also you could’ve included the wiki link in the post, so people could read up on what you just wrote:
This is a bit weird. I was just listening to Infinity 2 today (great book. Totally recommend), and there’s a section where the characters use Benford’s Law to prove reality. I then had to look it up myself.
Just a super weird coincidence…unless Lemmy is listening to me…
We are not listening to you Travis.
That had a 1 in a million chance, but I had to try.
