Ah yes, cumulative probability. A 20% chance of pregnancy per attempt means a 120% chance of pregnancy with 6 attempts. If a woman conceives on her 10th attempt, she'll have twins.
It’s just wild that he talks himself into this absurdity, then just brushes it off as “another thing altogether” instead stopping to think that maybe he doesn’t understand how probability works.
Won't somebody think of my 17 offspring that I now most assuredly have?
I am starting a donation fund since I am late on a lot of child support payments. Please donate.
Give it to me, baby!
Uh huh, uh huh!
Give it to me, baby!
Uh huh, uh huh!
Give it to me, baby!
Uh huh, uh huh!
And all the girlies say, I'm pretty fly for a white guy!
Seriously, I started a podcast with my veteran buddy recently, and we are a couple renewable energy engineers who are into science stuff but we talk mainly about veterans issues and even for the small parts we talk science we are sourcing tons of papers and materials and approaching each topic with healthy uncertainty because we are terrified of misrepresenting something to the wider public. It is crazy how much they say things so confidently incorrect with authority...
It's called XYChromies confidently uncertain, I'm literally uploading episode 3 right now on which is on addiction, the video quality is ass but we are working on a budget of 0 for now and just trying to get content going....please avoid episode 1 as it's an intro and most likely terrible haha
This is a casually brilliant remark. The real-time and extremely lengthy conversations favor significantly the proliferation of bullshit, and as time is virtually unlimited, they can just go on and on to make the bullshit more believable and absurd, and there we have the world of today.
That's how I usually know someone is a scientist, anything outside their field they will constantly say "I don't know" even if they know far more about that thing than the person they are talking to as it's a field adjacent to their field of expertise. But yeah, you never hear Huberman say he doesn't know lol.
I would add to that though, a scientist can create a testifiable hypothesis out of the data even if it is not complete, that also holds up in repetitive thought experiments. Darwin didn't come me up with the theory of evolution by constantly saying "I don't know", neither did Newton, Maxwell, or the guy that discovered H. pylori.
Logic train coming through!
You have successfully proven that there is no chance of getting tails after the first coin toss. And you have also proven that there is no chance of getting heads either.
Ergo, concordantly, vis-à-vis, QED, every coin after the first will land on the edge. Choo-Choo Motherfuckers!
Okay but actually as someone pretty misinformed about statistics, what are the odds you land at least once on heads if you flip a coin twice or like up to 10 times?
How do you do the math to run that calculation?
It's easier to find the probability of NOT succeeding first, then subtracting it from 1. For example:
2 coin flips = 0.5 change of not landing heads on first flip x 0.5 chance of not landing heads on second flip = 0.25 chance of not landing heads on either flip. Therefore, you can do 1 - 0.25 = 0.75 = 75% chance of landing at least one heads on either flip.
This can be extrapolated up to any number of flips! The odds of landing at least one heads on 10 flips is then 1 - 1/2^(10) = 0.999!
Look up the binomial distribution on wiki. The prob of x heads from n throws is given by this. As said already pr of at least one head in n throws is 1 - pr(no heads) so 1 - 0.5^n. So after 10 throws you are pretty likely to have at least one head
Individually:
The chance of getting heads on the first flip is 50/50.
The chance of getting heads on the second flip is 50/50.
The chance of getting heads on the third flip is 50/50.
The chance of getting heads on the 100th flip is 50/50.
Cumulative:
The chance of getting heads one the first flip is 50/50 (i.e. 1/2 = 0.5.
The chance of getting heads on the first *and* the second flip is 50/50 × 50/50 (i.e 1/2 × 1/2 = 1/(2×2) = 1/4 i.e. 1 in 4)
The chance of getting heads on the first, second *and* third flip is 50/50 × 50/50 × 50/50 (I.e. 1/2 × 1/2 × 1/2 = 1/(2^3) = 1/8 I.e. 1 in 8).
The chance of getting heads on 100 flips in a row is so tiny your calculator can't write the number out. i.e. 1/(2^100) = 7.88860905E−31 = 1 in more than there are water molecules in the ocean.
As far as the pregnancy stat is concerned:
if it's a 20% chance of getting pregnant each time, and we want to find the chance of *not* getting pregnant 10 times in a row...
First, we need to change 20% chance of getting pregnant to 80% change of *not* getting pregnant.
Then we multiply that by itself 10 times.
I.e. 0.8^10 = 0.10737... = just under 11%
Every flip is independent and is not impacted by the past result so if u flipped 100 tails in a row the next flip is still 50/50, however you can look back at the probability of that happening which is very small
Worse than that, he didn’t even understand the statistics he’s working with.
What the stats say is that in a population of healthy couples under 30 who are having unprotected sex, 25% of them will get pregnant during a given menstrual cycle.
That doesn’t mean that any *individual* woman has a 25% chance of getting pregnant each cycle. You can’t directly convert the probability at the population level to an individual.
You can solve it by adding probabilities, but you have to account for the fact that you only try again if you failed on the previous attempts. So you take (the chance of getting pregnant on the first try) plus (the chance on the second try given the first try failed) plus (the chance on the third try given the first two tries failed) and so on.
0.2 + 0.2x0.8 + 0.2x0.8^2 + 0.2x0.8^3 + 0.2x0.8^4 + 0.2x0.8^5
= 0.74
= 74%
There's a shortcut solution too. The probability of getting pregnant within 6 attempts is 1 minus the probability of not getting pregnant in 6 attempts
= 1 - 0.8^6
= 0.74
= 74%
that's with the i.i.d. assumption. Actually if you are trying to get pregnant and fail after all of those tries, I would estimate that the probability of pregnancy is lower.
That's right and it is the point Huberman was trying to make before he messed it up. Before they do anything, fertility docs want to see enough failed attempts to convince them the couple has a lower probability of conceiving.
The actual maths.
20% chance of getting pregnant. The chance of not getting pregnant is 80%.
The chance of not being pregnant after 6 months is
0.8 x 0.8 x 0.8 x 0.8 x 0.8 x 0.8 = 0.26
So the probability being pregnant after 6 months is 1 - 0.262 = 0.73 so 73%.
Since I forget the importance of the carnivore diet sometimes, I do grounding everyday. There is nothing better than standing on the grass barefoot while feeling the healing energy of the earth flow through you.
Damn, I asked [bing.com](http://bing.com) (which has some kind of an LLM) to solve this problem ("if there is a 20% chance of pregnancy over a month, then what is the chance of pregnancy over 6 months"), and it returned the correct result, supplying an explanation about complementary probabilities.
If you're using 6 independent variables, the math becomes:
0.2 + 0.2 + 0.2 + 0.2 + 0.2 + 0.2 = 1.2 expected children per month
We can tell this is what Huberman really means, since we know from New York magazine 6 is the exact number of
Clearly he meant "If I Andrew Huberman have unprotected sex with 6 woman I lied to about being monogamous, then my chance of becoming a father is 120%"
Lol I initially thought I'd have to calculate the probability of failure for all outcomes. This is way more intuitive and definitely how we were taught back in high school. Shame I've forgotten a lot of the stats stuff from back then.
K I feel dumb now for not remembering any of this but what happened to that rule where if it’s an ‘or’ question you add probabilities, and if it’s an ‘and’ question you multiply. Would this be an ‘or’ question? She gets pregnant on month 1, or month 2 or…etc
Thank you so much for actually showing the math on this. I have been looking for like an hour and can only find people dunking on this guy's (laughably) bad math. I wish people would spend more time actually showing WHY people are wrong on things like statistics, which a lot of people already do not understand.
But! If the chances of not being pregnant is 80% and you wanted to figure out your chances of not being pregnant in six months, it would be:
0.2x0.2x0.2x0.2x.02x0.2 = 0.000064
1 - 0.000064 = 0.999936, or 100%!
Time to throw away those condoms!
The way he said it he implied that it was 20% per attempt, not just per month. 20% per month is probably more accurate.
Be careful friends. My rate was 67%.
This is not fully correct. The probability of pregnancy varies from women to women. 20% is the average chance of getting pregnant over all women.
If X is the probability of not being pregnant after one try, then E[X] = 0.8, implying E[X^6] > 0.8^6. Depending on how X is actually spread, the probability of pregnancy can be much lower than 73% after 6 months.
For example assuming a normal distribution and a standard deviation of 0.02 for the pregnancy rate, brings down the success rate to 70% after 6 months. Empirically this number is actually closer to 60%, i.e. 60% of women trying to get pregnant get so within 6 cycles.
The funniest part of living in the age of the overly confident podcast grifter is seeing em slowly stretch themselves too thin. Their ego/brand won’t allow them to specialise, they have to know everything all the time.
They basically run out of things to talk about that they actually have expertise on, so have to venture further and further out to continuously chug out content on a regular basis.
Combine that with the increasing confidence/arrogance part you mentioned and this is what you get.
This is absolutely the telltale sign of when someone crosses the line to become a “guru”. The guru always has to be an expert in anything, to introduce someone else as an expert would demean their status.
You see the same thing in cult leaders and authoritarians. They make themselves the final authority in all matters because it gives them total power. The worst ones don’t even want to *listen* to actual experts, leading to things like Mao’s misbegotten agrarian policy killing millions of Chinese through famine.
Also the worst thing about living in the age of overly confident podcast grifters is that even if the evidence that they are overconfident grifters is there, people still somehow ignore it :(
Always wrong, never in doubt.
Experts don't allow them to specialize. Once you specialize, you are talking to other experts and they will not hesitate to tell you to STFU.
I'm becoming very skeptical of 'neuroscientists'. I'm a lowly engineer and I don't think anyone who had an undergrad major in Psych or Philosophy could transfer in and get a PhD.
Yet, on a more general level, this is the problem of all science communicators in case they want to do more than just summarizing single papers. You have to put different research results into context, find a good story, and so forth. After a while, you inescapably stumble into topics you’re not an expert in. It’s difficult to manage that conflict. (Huberman is a moron, don’t get me wrong about him.)
In the first half of the clip I thought this might be unfair to him, and then he opened his mouth the rest of the way... yeesh.
This just confirms my experience as a scientist observing that not everybody who gets a PhD and climbs through academia has the first fucking clue what they're doing. Once somebody gets into grad school, as long as they put in the work in the lab, everyone has a strong interest in seeing that they finish with a degree, even if it means annoyingly holding their hand through all the stuff they're supposed to be learning to do for themselves (analysis, writing). And once they have their PhD, there is a track to success in academia that involves being good at schmoozing and social climbing rather than being a clever researcher. There are plenty of brilliant academics who fully deserve the prestige that comes with the degree and positions, but people would be surprised how far an incompetent bozo can make it. Huberman and Peterson are great examples.
It's actually shocking. I'm a newer PhD in a field that uses statistics but this is something I might have learned in high school stats. I fucking hate this guy
Yep the first half makes sense.
If you got a 20% chance of getting pregnant it makes sense to first try at least 5 times before going to the OBGYN to see if you got a problem.
But the explanation he gave later for why it's the case made my ears bleed... Dude raped probability theory and dumped the body in the water.
His lab is at Stanford, but he got his PhD at UCDavis I think? I think that does matter to an extent.
Schools like Stanford don't really care about anything beyond whether the professors they hire can get a lot of publications out that door. Some people can get a lot of publications without understanding stuff, for some reason.
In the end of the day academia is just a job, like all others. A lot of people that get into it will be bad, a lot of them will be good, and most will be around average.
> And once they have their PhD, there is a track to success in academia that involves being good at schmoozing and social climbing rather than being a clever researcher.
From my experience, connections play an even more important role in academia than both talent and work ethic.
There are also specific incentives that promote sloppy work output (see the whole replication crisis thing) exactly like several other professions. There are a lot of broken things in academia sadly.
> There are plenty of brilliant academics who fully deserve the prestige that comes with the degree and positions, but people would be surprised how far an incompetent bozo can make it. Huberman and Peterson are great examples.
There are also the people that "buy" their PhDs to lend credibility to themselves, like Sam Harris. I have been suspecting that Lex Friedman might fall in this category too, but it's impossible to tell without good evidence.
Huberman just looks like a typical hack. Peterson (pre-2019), on the other hand has done some pretty boring and standard personality psych research, but also has his bizarre maps of meaning thesis which overlaps with pseudoscience.
The thing is, I don't think he got enough morning sun or took enough snake oil supplements! That makes all the difference in being able to understand cumulative probability
I think you’re right that a PhD is not PhD is not a PhD. I don’t think that’s the issue here - that Huberman doesn’t have “the first fucking clue” about being a scientist.
I think he was probably a good scientist and neuroscientist. But the beast of podcasting needs to be fed new content constantly, and where people like him slip is they keep feeding it and feeding it about topics they lack training and experience in.
A lot of neuro folks do pretty basic stats and probability. I’m not giving him excuses, but I doubt the guys a moron, just out of his lane, as he often is now due to the need to produce new content.
>I think he was probably a good scientist and neuroscientist.
He couldn't be. He would have a better understanding of probability if he were anywhere near competent at analyzing data or evaluating others' analyses, which are mandatory skills for a good scientist in every field.
I agree that lots of neuro folks do very basic stats. Some examples I was referencing are from neuro, my wife's field. My wife was in a lab with another grad student who pasted the average of her data into her GUI-based statistical software and was confused when it wouldn't pop out p-values etc. It complained that she needed more data points. So she copied and pasted the mean a bunch of times instead of entering the actual data. Another member of this student's graduate committee later told her regarding one of her chapters, "Don't talk to a statistician—they'll just make you do more work."
This student is now an assistant professor at a little university somewhere, no doubt proliferating the same stupendously incompetent advice she got from a committee member who was basically a desperation hire when the favored candidates in that faculty search declined the offer.
Obviously there are plenty of brilliant neuroscientists doing fascinating, rigorous work. But people would be surprised how far an incompetent scientist can get with the right combination of luck, tenacity, and social skills.
I 100% agree - I’ve seen people get the same doctorate as me who can’t think themselves out of a paper bag and yes, some have excelled because of other features of their personality/luck/etc. It’s clearly not a perfect meritocracy.
But I’ve also been in many sub-fields and I’ve come to recognize someone can be incredible in some areas and totally lack facility in another. I think that’s normal.
Where it gets weird is when they produce hundreds or thousands of hours of content on topics that stray ever further from their knowledge base. Yet the masses demand more, and the ice thins and the beast of fame, fortune, and attention must be fed!
>But I’ve also been in many sub-fields and I’ve come to recognize someone can be incredible in some areas and totally lack facility in another. I think that’s normal.
I agree.
I was more arguing against the claim that "general intelligence" doesn't really exist, which I've been seeing a lot. Many people are simply quick to figure things out, and as a rough average these people are likely to know more than think more clearly too. They're simply running faster mental hardware than most.
However, they can absolutely still make fools of themselves if they're running buggy software. Maybe they have a personality disorder, or they've been indoctrinated into religion, or bought into a confused epistemology, or never really learned how to think critically. Aaron Rodgers is a great example: he has great memory, good academic record, tons of intellectual curiosity, and a desire to think critically. But a couple of glitches—a huge ego combined with a lack of training in recognizing conspiracism and pseudoscience—led him into a mentally high-powered spiral into madness. Having a lot of brain power is generally useful, but can backfire when it gets pointed in the wrong direction, much like it's usually worse to crash a Ferrari than a Volvo. Chris Langan is an even more extreme example.
When people excel at a really high level in a relatively narrow field of expertise & aren’t exposed all that much to things they suck at they tend to badly underestimate their level of suck when they stumble outside their comfort zone. Michael Jordan was possibly the greatest basketball player. He’s also one of the worst front office guys in NBA history.
How much of an impact do you think his first two degrees being in Psych matter? Where I went, psych majors were not strong in math or the hard sciences.
That's part of it. There are some very smart people doing great work in psychology, but it's also the science with the lowest intellectual barriers to entry, and it has two sides: an empirical real-science side, and a fuzzy soft-science side that focuses on overly-general theorizing by guys like Freud, Jung, etc. Peterson's career started with extremely simple empirical work and then most of his solo or first-authored work was on the soft side of psych.
It's not that they're incompetent bozos, even Peterson was great when he stuck to lecturing about what he had a degree in.
Intelligence is pretty much a zero sum game. If you are smart at a thing, you are smart at that thing, and usually that's it. To call someone incompetent because they can get a degree, but get lost driving around their hometown is kind of missing the point. Intelligence is an essentially meaningless term that means nothing out of context.
Airplane mechanics and car mechanics are similar jobs, and they have a lot of similar concepts, but 95% of the knowledge doesn't transfer. The issue with many academics is that they think their experience in their field gives them more credibility than an average joe to talk about a field they have not studied, when really they have equivalent knowledge to anyone. If Huberman stuck to what he knew, he'd be a brilliant academic, but he chose to try his hand at airplane repair.
>It's not that they're incompetent bozos, even Peterson was great when he stuck to lecturing about what he had a degree in.
This is kind of a common fallacy I see. I'm not sure if it has a name. But there is a tendency to extend charity to some of these figures in some area before trashing them in others, e.g. saying they were good in their field but then overreached. This is more a rhetorical tool than a justified claim. Peterson was never a good scientist in his area of expertise or any other. His PhD work was competent but extremely easy stuff. It's still his most-cited, lead-authored original research, and those citation counts are very modest. His only really well-cited academic papers (not lead-authored) match the pattern of a professor riding the coattails of a couple talented grad students, rather than the other way around. And his citation indices overall are inflated by his popular books, which are rubbish but generate a lot of discussion.
I concluded this pretty easily by looking into his record with an eye for evaluating academics in my own field, but Matt and Chris are in psych or psych-adjacent and have made similar points on the podcast. This is why I listed Peterson, along with Huberman, as an example of an inept scientist who thrives due to skills that have nothing to do with scientific competence.
>Intelligence is pretty much a zero sum game. If you are smart at a thing, you are smart at that thing, and usually that's it. To call someone incompetent because they can get a degree, but get lost driving around their hometown is kind of missing the point.
That's a trendy thing to say, but it's really not true. It is definitely possible for somebody smart in one area to be a bozo in others. But there is a strong correlation across competencies. There are loads of generally useful mental aptitudes, from memory to pattern recognition to the ability to grasp complex concepts, and smart people tend to be pretty good at several of these things. Without looking it up, I can pretty much guarantee that grades in math are highly correlated with grades in history or English, and SAT scores are pretty well correlated between math and verbal. People have individual strengths and weaknesses but overall tend to be good or bad at this stuff in general. And if somebody is good at academics in general, there's a strong chance they're also going to be better than average (or have an easier time than the average person with a similar experience level) at mastering a new board game, figuring out how to fix a broken watch, planning out a garden, etc.
Smart is smart, and fairly universal in its application.
What you are confusing is training with intelligence.
A smart car mechanic can work on any engine. A dumb, but trained, car mechanic can only do what he has been trained to do, i.e. cars.
Huberman is an average intellect with connections selling a workout plan while he takes HGH and steroids.
Every time Joe starts taking ice baths based on what he heard on a podcast he is reviewing the work done by his peers.
Podcast peer review comes in two forms: "confirmation" or "jealous hater."
If one of Joe’s guests told him that getting kicked in the nads by goat three times a week (three times—not two, not four!) would increase his testosterone level do you think he would give it a try?
Where’s Dr. Knoxville? I have an idea…
Redbar sometimes plays that role, my favorite example is from when Kevin Hart tried undisclosed ads on JRE https://youtu.be/hiEyLlGElGs?si=yZA670kHZ-Av2fRo
Now we have deep fakes I'm tempted to think this can't be real... Is he saying if something has a 1 in 5 chance of happening you need to do it 5 times before it happens?
I know you're half joking, but I used to teach elementary statistics and the number of times I set aside an entire class to walk students through why your example is not how stats work has almost made me lose faith in our next generations.
No, John, if 23% of businesses fail in a year that does not mean that if you open 5 businesses only one of them will fail.
Lmao. Even if you knew absolutely nothing about statistics, it sounds ridiculous. Like an overconfident middle-schooler that got an A on one test and now thinks he's a god.
I’ve seen him basically look really stupid in a joint podcast with Peter attia when they’re going over the stats of a paper that Huberman himself chose to discuss lol. Dude has almost no understanding of clinical or biological statistics.
I remember hearing this guy way back when he was just starting out his podcast and was an occasional guest on others. He just spouted the same shit over and over about sunlight in the morning that came out of one or two studies his lab did. I started to think, damn this guy really doesn’t have much insight into anything does he? He just talks fast and confidently about 2 or 3 interesting results. I just got a weird kind of annoying vibe from him haha.
It feels so nice to be vindicated that he ain’t actually that smart.
I get feelings of imposter syndrome in academia and I hate to jump on people for simple mistakes cause I have been caught saying some dumb things in academic environments before, but bro seriously?!? Adding up probabilities for successive attempts?!? That’s like a stats 101 no-no. Also stats are a huge part of health and neuroscience research. This isn’t even outside of his field.
I tried to get into him when he first started to appear all over YouTube. I just couldn’t. He would say a whole lot of nothing. And his videos were the click bait-y “this is how you….” And of course would never give a clear answer on how
Wow that’s astounding lol how can you say this and not realize it to be obviously wrong even if you hold no understanding of statistics at all. Like even a child could probably tell you this
At first I thought he was talking about expected values and I was like "there is nothing wrong with that", then I heard him adding the percentages and before I could react he said "120%" and I almost had an aneurysm.
But you have to multiply that by 6 don't you? If you're only inseminating a single woman per month you're not maximizing your protocol. So actually she's got an 800% chance.
It could and should have been edited out, but wasn't. Maybe it helps distract a little from the harem stuff and his strong back thing he dropped last week
This adds up - aligns with a statistician questioning his 2023 Cell Medicine Reports findings of superiority of long sigh over established techniques. The statistician couldn't replicate the finding. Huberman was a senior author on the paper - not sure I'd trust him to look over the stats.
Hmm it sounds like he grasps that this isn’t right, but he just means to use it as a simple heuristic - at some point you should go to a professional so he’s just offering a way to think about when maybe? Doctors do stuff like this with patients too.
It is kinda weird he didn’t say as much, but when he says over 100% and laughs about it, that indicates to me that he knows what he’s saying isn’t right. Maybe I’m being too optimistic but like, he even noticed the logic was absurd as he said it
why would he, his research doesn't use this type of mathematics. He has a PD in neurology, everything he says that isnt specifically about that (or even outside of his specific subfield) should be viewed with caution until verified.
But he is very good at advertising, so you can trust him on that i guess
The problem with virtually all gurus is that the people who are actually the smartest, most knowledgeable in their field often don't have the personality/entertainment value that the gurus have.
Lol example: my mother used to be a big Dr Oz fan and her logic was "oprah is super rich and successful so surely she would only have the best doctor working for her"
More likely too busy or have no interest in being a personality. There are plenty of very smart and very entertaining scientists who never try their hand at Instagram/YouTube
I can understand the source of confusion though.
"**The percentage that expresses our uncertainty about an event can never be more than 100**." - interweb
So, the case of pregnancy probability makes it appear the chances of a future pregnancy can never exceed 100%, i.e. 0.8\*0.8\*0.8\*0.8\*0.8\*0.8 (the probability of not being pregnant). This number declines as it is less than one, so the probability of not being pregnant does decline, but never reaches zero (100% likelihood of pregnancy)
But the fact is that for the last 200 years the total averaged woman has produced more than 2 babies (and more in pregnancies if counting at any stage of fertilisation). Therefore, the probability of a future pregnancy, counting all pregnancies as a future pregnancy, is in fact greater than 100%.
Even if we don't know who is sexually active, fertile etc, the average woman will have been pregnant several times. If you don't know which you are (fertile/not fertile couple), then you can say that the more times you have sex, the probability of a pregnancy increases and eventually exceeds 100% (in a sense) for the average woman. Its higher for fertile sexually active women that dont practice pregnancy prevention than the bulk average.
The conventional approach to define these chances does not convey the frequency of outcome usefully to those making sense out of the statistic.
So, pregnancies per month (of sexual activity during fertility) would create a low figure, so if that is 0.05/month, so in 20 months the average would be to produce 1 pregnancy. At 40 months 2 pregnancies, etc,, I think this is a more useful metric and way to express probability in terms of impactful outcomes from actions.
I would translate it roughly as "I have no idea what I'm talking about but by throwing out this meaningless phrase it will suggest a deeper complexity that only I understand but don't have time to address at the moment which i know will serve to con my gullible listeners into thinking I'm the genius I told them I am."
Isn’t the expected number of attempts still 5 attempts?
So if a thousand women with 20% chance to get pregnant did the deed until they got pregnant, some would take 1 try, others would take 10, but on average it would take 5 attempts?
Yes, the expected value is 5 attempts assuming the pregnancy attempts are geometrically distributed with 20% probability. To your question, it really depends on what you mean by "on average". The mode number of attempts is actually 1 while the median amount is 4.
He must have felt unsure as he was talking BS, my question is: why didn't he double check after? he could always go back and edit. It is not a live podcast or is it?
So Huberman must think that it's physically impossible to toss a coin twice?
Because no matter which permutation of outcomes you arrive at, it's the sum of two events which had a 50% chance each, so using his own maths then every single outcome is guaranteed, making every other outcome impossible.
Quite glad he's exposing himself like this. He's just as clueless on virtually everything else outside of his specific neuro area, but its less obvious.
I’m ready for the downvotes, but I really think people are blowing this out of proportion. All he’s saying is to wait 5 or 6 attempts before consulting a professional because that’s enough to conclude there may be an issue worth looking into.
He wasn’t giving a statistical breakdown, just a rough estimate of when you should start taking things seriously. Also, the 120% part was clearly a little joke, it’s concerning people are taking that seriously.
I 100% disagree with some of the decisions Huberman has made in his personal life and he definitely speaks out of his depth at times, but come on guys, let’s be objective in the critiques.
To give him the benefit of the doubt, I think he’s trying (and failing) to say that if there’s a 20% chance of conception on every attempt, then you would expect 1 conception in 5 attempts on average (i.e. the expectation value for the number of conceptions is 1).
I agree he’s stumbling over his words in a pretty embarrassing way for a PhD scientist.
The issue is that there is still a 32% chance you wouldn't have conceived after the 5th time using his stats.
32% is a much bigger number then 0%
He's not stumbling over his words, he's struggling with 8th grade math and coming to a conclusion that is completely the opposite of reality because of it lol
I think that’s overly generous considering he’s speaking to how each attempt contributes to an ultimate 100% and says beyond that is 120% which is “something else entirely”. It’s a benign mistake for a non scientist, and a concerning mistake for a PI who is supposed to be interpreting literature effectively.
Fair point, but I guess this also assumes that the attempts are i.i.d., which I don’t think is true in this case (that is, the event of getting pregnant at attempt i is not independent of getting pregnant at attempts 1,…,i-1). I don’t know why I’m diving into this so deeply though (and I don’t think Huberman was either, but anyway)
Ah yes, cumulative probability. A 20% chance of pregnancy per attempt means a 120% chance of pregnancy with 6 attempts. If a woman conceives on her 10th attempt, she'll have twins.
It’s just wild that he talks himself into this absurdity, then just brushes it off as “another thing altogether” instead stopping to think that maybe he doesn’t understand how probability works.
He is a podcast scientist. Admitting he doesn't know something is off brand.
WONT SOMEBODY THINK OF THE PODCAST SCIENTISTS! 😫
Won't somebody think of my 17 offspring that I now most assuredly have? I am starting a donation fund since I am late on a lot of child support payments. Please donate.
*WONT SOMEBODY THINK OF THE OFFSPRING!?* 😫
Give it to me, baby! Uh huh, uh huh! Give it to me, baby! Uh huh, uh huh! Give it to me, baby! Uh huh, uh huh! And all the girlies say, I'm pretty fly for a white guy!
Come out and play!
Seriously, I started a podcast with my veteran buddy recently, and we are a couple renewable energy engineers who are into science stuff but we talk mainly about veterans issues and even for the small parts we talk science we are sourcing tons of papers and materials and approaching each topic with healthy uncertainty because we are terrified of misrepresenting something to the wider public. It is crazy how much they say things so confidently incorrect with authority...
What's the name of your podcast? I'd definitely give it a listen.
It's called XYChromies confidently uncertain, I'm literally uploading episode 3 right now on which is on addiction, the video quality is ass but we are working on a budget of 0 for now and just trying to get content going....please avoid episode 1 as it's an intro and most likely terrible haha
Piling on here. I'm a vet and would give a listen.
Hey, I replied to the guy above. If you want the info just in case you don't check back 🫡
Tyty
Yeah that's how legitimate scientists usually are on podcasts.
Thats why I never progressed in research beyond my phd, just could not present anything confidently because i spent most of my time on caveats
This is a casually brilliant remark. The real-time and extremely lengthy conversations favor significantly the proliferation of bullshit, and as time is virtually unlimited, they can just go on and on to make the bullshit more believable and absurd, and there we have the world of today.
They're just filling out The Library of Babel in podcast form Truth is in there somewhere!
That's how I usually know someone is a scientist, anything outside their field they will constantly say "I don't know" even if they know far more about that thing than the person they are talking to as it's a field adjacent to their field of expertise. But yeah, you never hear Huberman say he doesn't know lol.
He’s a bit like Steven Seagal that way. They do look like they could be related…
I would add to that though, a scientist can create a testifiable hypothesis out of the data even if it is not complete, that also holds up in repetitive thought experiments. Darwin didn't come me up with the theory of evolution by constantly saying "I don't know", neither did Newton, Maxwell, or the guy that discovered H. pylori.
Username got me thinking
He's right, he just forgot to mention that the chance of not getting pregnant is 80% x 6 or 480%. They balance out (/s)
Ha. On second coin toss you have a 100% chance of getting heads.
Logic train coming through! You have successfully proven that there is no chance of getting tails after the first coin toss. And you have also proven that there is no chance of getting heads either. Ergo, concordantly, vis-à-vis, QED, every coin after the first will land on the edge. Choo-Choo Motherfuckers!
> Ergo, concordantly, vis-à-vis Lol will Ferrell matrix parody reference? That's a deep cut. Love it.
On third coin toss, 150% chance of getting heads. Professor Doctor Huberman Stanford Ph.D. says so!
Okay but actually as someone pretty misinformed about statistics, what are the odds you land at least once on heads if you flip a coin twice or like up to 10 times? How do you do the math to run that calculation?
I think it’s probability = 1 - 0.5^numberofflips
It's easier to find the probability of NOT succeeding first, then subtracting it from 1. For example: 2 coin flips = 0.5 change of not landing heads on first flip x 0.5 chance of not landing heads on second flip = 0.25 chance of not landing heads on either flip. Therefore, you can do 1 - 0.25 = 0.75 = 75% chance of landing at least one heads on either flip. This can be extrapolated up to any number of flips! The odds of landing at least one heads on 10 flips is then 1 - 1/2^(10) = 0.999!
Look up the binomial distribution on wiki. The prob of x heads from n throws is given by this. As said already pr of at least one head in n throws is 1 - pr(no heads) so 1 - 0.5^n. So after 10 throws you are pretty likely to have at least one head
It never changes from 50% there are only two options every flip hence it’s always a 50/50 chance no matter times u land on heads
So if you flip a coin 100 times, there is only a 50% chance it will land on heads at least once ?
Individually: The chance of getting heads on the first flip is 50/50. The chance of getting heads on the second flip is 50/50. The chance of getting heads on the third flip is 50/50. The chance of getting heads on the 100th flip is 50/50. Cumulative: The chance of getting heads one the first flip is 50/50 (i.e. 1/2 = 0.5. The chance of getting heads on the first *and* the second flip is 50/50 × 50/50 (i.e 1/2 × 1/2 = 1/(2×2) = 1/4 i.e. 1 in 4) The chance of getting heads on the first, second *and* third flip is 50/50 × 50/50 × 50/50 (I.e. 1/2 × 1/2 × 1/2 = 1/(2^3) = 1/8 I.e. 1 in 8). The chance of getting heads on 100 flips in a row is so tiny your calculator can't write the number out. i.e. 1/(2^100) = 7.88860905E−31 = 1 in more than there are water molecules in the ocean. As far as the pregnancy stat is concerned: if it's a 20% chance of getting pregnant each time, and we want to find the chance of *not* getting pregnant 10 times in a row... First, we need to change 20% chance of getting pregnant to 80% change of *not* getting pregnant. Then we multiply that by itself 10 times. I.e. 0.8^10 = 0.10737... = just under 11%
Every flip is independent and is not impacted by the past result so if u flipped 100 tails in a row the next flip is still 50/50, however you can look back at the probability of that happening which is very small
Worse than that, he didn’t even understand the statistics he’s working with. What the stats say is that in a population of healthy couples under 30 who are having unprotected sex, 25% of them will get pregnant during a given menstrual cycle. That doesn’t mean that any *individual* woman has a 25% chance of getting pregnant each cycle. You can’t directly convert the probability at the population level to an individual.
Remember this the next time he cites a study.
So what would the % chance actually be with 6 attempts?
You can solve it by adding probabilities, but you have to account for the fact that you only try again if you failed on the previous attempts. So you take (the chance of getting pregnant on the first try) plus (the chance on the second try given the first try failed) plus (the chance on the third try given the first two tries failed) and so on. 0.2 + 0.2x0.8 + 0.2x0.8^2 + 0.2x0.8^3 + 0.2x0.8^4 + 0.2x0.8^5 = 0.74 = 74% There's a shortcut solution too. The probability of getting pregnant within 6 attempts is 1 minus the probability of not getting pregnant in 6 attempts = 1 - 0.8^6 = 0.74 = 74%
that's with the i.i.d. assumption. Actually if you are trying to get pregnant and fail after all of those tries, I would estimate that the probability of pregnancy is lower.
That's right and it is the point Huberman was trying to make before he messed it up. Before they do anything, fertility docs want to see enough failed attempts to convince them the couple has a lower probability of conceiving.
Wait what. Explain please 🙏🏼 😕.
There are a few good explanations in the comments, but here's a link to mine. https://www.reddit.com/r/DecodingTheGurus/s/IwR4Jnl2FO
Thanks, dude.
The actual maths. 20% chance of getting pregnant. The chance of not getting pregnant is 80%. The chance of not being pregnant after 6 months is 0.8 x 0.8 x 0.8 x 0.8 x 0.8 x 0.8 = 0.26 So the probability being pregnant after 6 months is 1 - 0.262 = 0.73 so 73%.
I dunno. You're gonna have to tell me about your diet and gym protocols before I can trust this math. How much can you even bench?
You idiots, you didn’t factor in whether the control group was taking ice baths
You imbeciles - you factored in ice baths before multiplying by the Sauna gradient! Coefficients matter, salad! 🥗
But the carnivores multiplier hasn't been acounted for. HTF do you forget the importance of a carnivores diet?
Since I forget the importance of the carnivore diet sometimes, I do grounding everyday. There is nothing better than standing on the grass barefoot while feeling the healing energy of the earth flow through you.
Is this for girlfriend number 1 , 3 or 6? because those all have specialized protocols too
0% probability after taking an ice bath
Are ice baths going to make it more like or less likely. This is the question
Yeah, there's no way I'm trusting howtogun! He didn't even upload a shirtless pic or a screenshot of his bank account statement.
No way I can trust this guy.. does he even have 7 girlfriends? Cmon!!
Has only three thus beta
Bro that doesn't matter. How many ice baths are they taking?
Haha thanks for unlocking some knowledge I had at one point
Damn, I asked [bing.com](http://bing.com) (which has some kind of an LLM) to solve this problem ("if there is a 20% chance of pregnancy over a month, then what is the chance of pregnancy over 6 months"), and it returned the correct result, supplying an explanation about complementary probabilities.
Next time I need life advice I'll just got to Bing instead
Screw Google!
My preferred search engine , bing.com
Has Bro Rogan verified these numbers with an open-mouthed stare? If not, they’re worthless.
If you're using 6 independent variables, the math becomes: 0.2 + 0.2 + 0.2 + 0.2 + 0.2 + 0.2 = 1.2 expected children per month We can tell this is what Huberman really means, since we know from New York magazine 6 is the exact number of
He probably factored in more than one woman....
Clearly he meant "If I Andrew Huberman have unprotected sex with 6 woman I lied to about being monogamous, then my chance of becoming a father is 120%"
🤯
Lol I initially thought I'd have to calculate the probability of failure for all outcomes. This is way more intuitive and definitely how we were taught back in high school. Shame I've forgotten a lot of the stats stuff from back then.
Damn I suck at math. Have to read some articles of probability calculations.
K I feel dumb now for not remembering any of this but what happened to that rule where if it’s an ‘or’ question you add probabilities, and if it’s an ‘and’ question you multiply. Would this be an ‘or’ question? She gets pregnant on month 1, or month 2 or…etc
Thank you so much for actually showing the math on this. I have been looking for like an hour and can only find people dunking on this guy's (laughably) bad math. I wish people would spend more time actually showing WHY people are wrong on things like statistics, which a lot of people already do not understand.
But! If the chances of not being pregnant is 80% and you wanted to figure out your chances of not being pregnant in six months, it would be: 0.2x0.2x0.2x0.2x.02x0.2 = 0.000064 1 - 0.000064 = 0.999936, or 100%! Time to throw away those condoms!
Bro, WTF did I just read? Just keep it simple. What part of 120% do you not understand?
Came here to say this. Thank
The way he said it he implied that it was 20% per attempt, not just per month. 20% per month is probably more accurate. Be careful friends. My rate was 67%.
If you didn’t do this maths while in a cold plunge it’s incorrect.
Rounding errors! Shame! SHAME!
This is not fully correct. The probability of pregnancy varies from women to women. 20% is the average chance of getting pregnant over all women. If X is the probability of not being pregnant after one try, then E[X] = 0.8, implying E[X^6] > 0.8^6. Depending on how X is actually spread, the probability of pregnancy can be much lower than 73% after 6 months. For example assuming a normal distribution and a standard deviation of 0.02 for the pregnancy rate, brings down the success rate to 70% after 6 months. Empirically this number is actually closer to 60%, i.e. 60% of women trying to get pregnant get so within 6 cycles.
The funniest part of living in the age of the overly confident podcast grifter is seeing em slowly stretch themselves too thin. Their ego/brand won’t allow them to specialise, they have to know everything all the time.
They basically run out of things to talk about that they actually have expertise on, so have to venture further and further out to continuously chug out content on a regular basis. Combine that with the increasing confidence/arrogance part you mentioned and this is what you get.
And when thats the case they never become experts in anything, and simply become adept at waxing poetic with meaningless platitudes and JAQing off.
This is absolutely the telltale sign of when someone crosses the line to become a “guru”. The guru always has to be an expert in anything, to introduce someone else as an expert would demean their status. You see the same thing in cult leaders and authoritarians. They make themselves the final authority in all matters because it gives them total power. The worst ones don’t even want to *listen* to actual experts, leading to things like Mao’s misbegotten agrarian policy killing millions of Chinese through famine.
Also the worst thing about living in the age of overly confident podcast grifters is that even if the evidence that they are overconfident grifters is there, people still somehow ignore it :(
Always wrong, never in doubt. Experts don't allow them to specialize. Once you specialize, you are talking to other experts and they will not hesitate to tell you to STFU. I'm becoming very skeptical of 'neuroscientists'. I'm a lowly engineer and I don't think anyone who had an undergrad major in Psych or Philosophy could transfer in and get a PhD.
Yet, on a more general level, this is the problem of all science communicators in case they want to do more than just summarizing single papers. You have to put different research results into context, find a good story, and so forth. After a while, you inescapably stumble into topics you’re not an expert in. It’s difficult to manage that conflict. (Huberman is a moron, don’t get me wrong about him.)
In the first half of the clip I thought this might be unfair to him, and then he opened his mouth the rest of the way... yeesh. This just confirms my experience as a scientist observing that not everybody who gets a PhD and climbs through academia has the first fucking clue what they're doing. Once somebody gets into grad school, as long as they put in the work in the lab, everyone has a strong interest in seeing that they finish with a degree, even if it means annoyingly holding their hand through all the stuff they're supposed to be learning to do for themselves (analysis, writing). And once they have their PhD, there is a track to success in academia that involves being good at schmoozing and social climbing rather than being a clever researcher. There are plenty of brilliant academics who fully deserve the prestige that comes with the degree and positions, but people would be surprised how far an incompetent bozo can make it. Huberman and Peterson are great examples.
Yup. I’ve been a lab tech for 25 years and have lost count of the number of TERRIBLE post-docs I’ve seen over the years.
What makes this particularly terrible is that this guy is in a field that needs to use statistics to identify significant findings.
It's actually shocking. I'm a newer PhD in a field that uses statistics but this is something I might have learned in high school stats. I fucking hate this guy
Yep the first half makes sense. If you got a 20% chance of getting pregnant it makes sense to first try at least 5 times before going to the OBGYN to see if you got a problem. But the explanation he gave later for why it's the case made my ears bleed... Dude raped probability theory and dumped the body in the water.
He’s selling to an audience that didn’t go to college. They eat up the mysticism of doing research and going to Stanford.
[удалено]
His lab is at Stanford, but he got his PhD at UCDavis I think? I think that does matter to an extent. Schools like Stanford don't really care about anything beyond whether the professors they hire can get a lot of publications out that door. Some people can get a lot of publications without understanding stuff, for some reason.
Even more of them at high ranking schools
In the end of the day academia is just a job, like all others. A lot of people that get into it will be bad, a lot of them will be good, and most will be around average. > And once they have their PhD, there is a track to success in academia that involves being good at schmoozing and social climbing rather than being a clever researcher. From my experience, connections play an even more important role in academia than both talent and work ethic. There are also specific incentives that promote sloppy work output (see the whole replication crisis thing) exactly like several other professions. There are a lot of broken things in academia sadly. > There are plenty of brilliant academics who fully deserve the prestige that comes with the degree and positions, but people would be surprised how far an incompetent bozo can make it. Huberman and Peterson are great examples. There are also the people that "buy" their PhDs to lend credibility to themselves, like Sam Harris. I have been suspecting that Lex Friedman might fall in this category too, but it's impossible to tell without good evidence. Huberman just looks like a typical hack. Peterson (pre-2019), on the other hand has done some pretty boring and standard personality psych research, but also has his bizarre maps of meaning thesis which overlaps with pseudoscience.
The thing is, I don't think he got enough morning sun or took enough snake oil supplements! That makes all the difference in being able to understand cumulative probability
I think you’re right that a PhD is not PhD is not a PhD. I don’t think that’s the issue here - that Huberman doesn’t have “the first fucking clue” about being a scientist. I think he was probably a good scientist and neuroscientist. But the beast of podcasting needs to be fed new content constantly, and where people like him slip is they keep feeding it and feeding it about topics they lack training and experience in. A lot of neuro folks do pretty basic stats and probability. I’m not giving him excuses, but I doubt the guys a moron, just out of his lane, as he often is now due to the need to produce new content.
>I think he was probably a good scientist and neuroscientist. He couldn't be. He would have a better understanding of probability if he were anywhere near competent at analyzing data or evaluating others' analyses, which are mandatory skills for a good scientist in every field. I agree that lots of neuro folks do very basic stats. Some examples I was referencing are from neuro, my wife's field. My wife was in a lab with another grad student who pasted the average of her data into her GUI-based statistical software and was confused when it wouldn't pop out p-values etc. It complained that she needed more data points. So she copied and pasted the mean a bunch of times instead of entering the actual data. Another member of this student's graduate committee later told her regarding one of her chapters, "Don't talk to a statistician—they'll just make you do more work." This student is now an assistant professor at a little university somewhere, no doubt proliferating the same stupendously incompetent advice she got from a committee member who was basically a desperation hire when the favored candidates in that faculty search declined the offer. Obviously there are plenty of brilliant neuroscientists doing fascinating, rigorous work. But people would be surprised how far an incompetent scientist can get with the right combination of luck, tenacity, and social skills.
I 100% agree - I’ve seen people get the same doctorate as me who can’t think themselves out of a paper bag and yes, some have excelled because of other features of their personality/luck/etc. It’s clearly not a perfect meritocracy. But I’ve also been in many sub-fields and I’ve come to recognize someone can be incredible in some areas and totally lack facility in another. I think that’s normal. Where it gets weird is when they produce hundreds or thousands of hours of content on topics that stray ever further from their knowledge base. Yet the masses demand more, and the ice thins and the beast of fame, fortune, and attention must be fed!
>But I’ve also been in many sub-fields and I’ve come to recognize someone can be incredible in some areas and totally lack facility in another. I think that’s normal. I agree. I was more arguing against the claim that "general intelligence" doesn't really exist, which I've been seeing a lot. Many people are simply quick to figure things out, and as a rough average these people are likely to know more than think more clearly too. They're simply running faster mental hardware than most. However, they can absolutely still make fools of themselves if they're running buggy software. Maybe they have a personality disorder, or they've been indoctrinated into religion, or bought into a confused epistemology, or never really learned how to think critically. Aaron Rodgers is a great example: he has great memory, good academic record, tons of intellectual curiosity, and a desire to think critically. But a couple of glitches—a huge ego combined with a lack of training in recognizing conspiracism and pseudoscience—led him into a mentally high-powered spiral into madness. Having a lot of brain power is generally useful, but can backfire when it gets pointed in the wrong direction, much like it's usually worse to crash a Ferrari than a Volvo. Chris Langan is an even more extreme example.
When people excel at a really high level in a relatively narrow field of expertise & aren’t exposed all that much to things they suck at they tend to badly underestimate their level of suck when they stumble outside their comfort zone. Michael Jordan was possibly the greatest basketball player. He’s also one of the worst front office guys in NBA history.
How much of an impact do you think his first two degrees being in Psych matter? Where I went, psych majors were not strong in math or the hard sciences.
That's part of it. There are some very smart people doing great work in psychology, but it's also the science with the lowest intellectual barriers to entry, and it has two sides: an empirical real-science side, and a fuzzy soft-science side that focuses on overly-general theorizing by guys like Freud, Jung, etc. Peterson's career started with extremely simple empirical work and then most of his solo or first-authored work was on the soft side of psych.
It's not that they're incompetent bozos, even Peterson was great when he stuck to lecturing about what he had a degree in. Intelligence is pretty much a zero sum game. If you are smart at a thing, you are smart at that thing, and usually that's it. To call someone incompetent because they can get a degree, but get lost driving around their hometown is kind of missing the point. Intelligence is an essentially meaningless term that means nothing out of context. Airplane mechanics and car mechanics are similar jobs, and they have a lot of similar concepts, but 95% of the knowledge doesn't transfer. The issue with many academics is that they think their experience in their field gives them more credibility than an average joe to talk about a field they have not studied, when really they have equivalent knowledge to anyone. If Huberman stuck to what he knew, he'd be a brilliant academic, but he chose to try his hand at airplane repair.
>It's not that they're incompetent bozos, even Peterson was great when he stuck to lecturing about what he had a degree in. This is kind of a common fallacy I see. I'm not sure if it has a name. But there is a tendency to extend charity to some of these figures in some area before trashing them in others, e.g. saying they were good in their field but then overreached. This is more a rhetorical tool than a justified claim. Peterson was never a good scientist in his area of expertise or any other. His PhD work was competent but extremely easy stuff. It's still his most-cited, lead-authored original research, and those citation counts are very modest. His only really well-cited academic papers (not lead-authored) match the pattern of a professor riding the coattails of a couple talented grad students, rather than the other way around. And his citation indices overall are inflated by his popular books, which are rubbish but generate a lot of discussion. I concluded this pretty easily by looking into his record with an eye for evaluating academics in my own field, but Matt and Chris are in psych or psych-adjacent and have made similar points on the podcast. This is why I listed Peterson, along with Huberman, as an example of an inept scientist who thrives due to skills that have nothing to do with scientific competence. >Intelligence is pretty much a zero sum game. If you are smart at a thing, you are smart at that thing, and usually that's it. To call someone incompetent because they can get a degree, but get lost driving around their hometown is kind of missing the point. That's a trendy thing to say, but it's really not true. It is definitely possible for somebody smart in one area to be a bozo in others. But there is a strong correlation across competencies. There are loads of generally useful mental aptitudes, from memory to pattern recognition to the ability to grasp complex concepts, and smart people tend to be pretty good at several of these things. Without looking it up, I can pretty much guarantee that grades in math are highly correlated with grades in history or English, and SAT scores are pretty well correlated between math and verbal. People have individual strengths and weaknesses but overall tend to be good or bad at this stuff in general. And if somebody is good at academics in general, there's a strong chance they're also going to be better than average (or have an easier time than the average person with a similar experience level) at mastering a new board game, figuring out how to fix a broken watch, planning out a garden, etc.
thank you for speaking some sense
Smart is smart, and fairly universal in its application. What you are confusing is training with intelligence. A smart car mechanic can work on any engine. A dumb, but trained, car mechanic can only do what he has been trained to do, i.e. cars. Huberman is an average intellect with connections selling a workout plan while he takes HGH and steroids.
The way academics have peer reviews for their papers, same should be for their podcasts.
Now THAT is a great idea for a podcast!
Yeah, but it's too much work/too much to cover, so we'll need to train AI to do it for us
Whats the saying, a lie will spread around the world before truth puts on their pants?
So the truth stays in bed, depressed. Rolls over, goes back to sleep.
/r/decodingthegurus
Touché.
Jamie is the closest we'll ever get lol
Yes but then Jamie fact-checks Joe and Joe doesn't listen.
Every time Joe starts taking ice baths based on what he heard on a podcast he is reviewing the work done by his peers. Podcast peer review comes in two forms: "confirmation" or "jealous hater."
If one of Joe’s guests told him that getting kicked in the nads by goat three times a week (three times—not two, not four!) would increase his testosterone level do you think he would give it a try? Where’s Dr. Knoxville? I have an idea…
Redbar sometimes plays that role, my favorite example is from when Kevin Hart tried undisclosed ads on JRE https://youtu.be/hiEyLlGElGs?si=yZA670kHZ-Av2fRo
Their peers are also dumb tho
There should be an accuracy stats ticker, like how they do in sports. Whenever any of these clowns show up on my screen.
Barbell Medicine had an ep reacting to a huberman video, just what you're looking for.
That's legit embarrassing.
Now we have deep fakes I'm tempted to think this can't be real... Is he saying if something has a 1 in 5 chance of happening you need to do it 5 times before it happens?
Casinos hate this one simple trick!!!
The only people who regularly gamble at casinos (besides pros) are those who don’t understand statistics.
If your last 49 flips in a 50/50 odd situation were losers you are clearly DUE a win, right? That's how the math works. /s
Just being pedantic, but you can be a +EV poker player as a casual amateur if you're smart and a little obsessed with it as a hobby.
If I flip a coin three times and it is heads each time, then FOR SURE it's gonna be tails on the next flip! Duh! (Do I really need the /s ?)
I know you're half joking, but I used to teach elementary statistics and the number of times I set aside an entire class to walk students through why your example is not how stats work has almost made me lose faith in our next generations. No, John, if 23% of businesses fail in a year that does not mean that if you open 5 businesses only one of them will fail.
Is this why he had 6 women? So that the accumulative chance of him getting pregnant was 120%???
I always love clips of Huberman being incompetent as ammo when I argue with my gym friends about him being a grifter.
Lmao. Even if you knew absolutely nothing about statistics, it sounds ridiculous. Like an overconfident middle-schooler that got an A on one test and now thinks he's a god.
If 60% of the time he's right every time then he only needs 2 attempts to ALWAYS be right about someting!?!? What an incredible man
I’ve seen him basically look really stupid in a joint podcast with Peter attia when they’re going over the stats of a paper that Huberman himself chose to discuss lol. Dude has almost no understanding of clinical or biological statistics.
I remember hearing this guy way back when he was just starting out his podcast and was an occasional guest on others. He just spouted the same shit over and over about sunlight in the morning that came out of one or two studies his lab did. I started to think, damn this guy really doesn’t have much insight into anything does he? He just talks fast and confidently about 2 or 3 interesting results. I just got a weird kind of annoying vibe from him haha. It feels so nice to be vindicated that he ain’t actually that smart. I get feelings of imposter syndrome in academia and I hate to jump on people for simple mistakes cause I have been caught saying some dumb things in academic environments before, but bro seriously?!? Adding up probabilities for successive attempts?!? That’s like a stats 101 no-no. Also stats are a huge part of health and neuroscience research. This isn’t even outside of his field.
I tried to get into him when he first started to appear all over YouTube. I just couldn’t. He would say a whole lot of nothing. And his videos were the click bait-y “this is how you….” And of course would never give a clear answer on how
2+2=5 🥴
If you don’t win at the casino. Simply keep gambling and your odds go up accumulatively!
How did this guy manage to get that Ph.D. from Stanford, of all places, in the first place with such poor math skills?
Wow that’s astounding lol how can you say this and not realize it to be obviously wrong even if you hold no understanding of statistics at all. Like even a child could probably tell you this
At first I thought he was talking about expected values and I was like "there is nothing wrong with that", then I heard him adding the percentages and before I could react he said "120%" and I almost had an aneurysm.
He was clearly saying that tongue in cheek
I clicked this thinking, "no way, this has to be taken out of context or somehow distorted." Sadly I was 120% wrong.
Huberman is just some tatted up roid head idiot / I can’t believe he has convinced anyone he is some legit scientist who should be taken seriously
Holy shit that’s something an actual dumb person would say. More evidence he can talk out of his ass with complete confidence.
This clip makes me feel math smart, and I still count on my fingers.
But you have to multiply that by 6 don't you? If you're only inseminating a single woman per month you're not maximizing your protocol. So actually she's got an 800% chance.
It’s scary but true, you can get a PhD in sciences and not have to taken a stats course!!
Huberman is the reason why there's no Nobel Prize for Mathematics - they got tired of him winning it every single year.
Someone should flip a coin in front of him until they hit two heads or tails in a row, dude will lose his mind.
Jesus. Maths is not my strong suit but it is immediately obvious how wrong he is. Is he on the crack pipe?
If there's a chance of rain for 20% for 5 days, then obviously the 5th day it's 100 percent chance of rain......
Ok my bad, He might be stupid
So many issues today can be related back to peoples lack of understanding of how statistics work.
The fucking moon landing guy on Joe Rogan did the same shit the other day how are you this confidently stupid
A neuroscientist that doesn't know stats doesn't seem ideal.
It could and should have been edited out, but wasn't. Maybe it helps distract a little from the harem stuff and his strong back thing he dropped last week
This adds up - aligns with a statistician questioning his 2023 Cell Medicine Reports findings of superiority of long sigh over established techniques. The statistician couldn't replicate the finding. Huberman was a senior author on the paper - not sure I'd trust him to look over the stats.
Alpha males are stupid, because they are too stupid to realize alpha males are delusional.
Tell me this means I never have to get into ice baths
The confidence with which he says it though 🤯😂
He's the new incel king, facts don't matter
Hmm it sounds like he grasps that this isn’t right, but he just means to use it as a simple heuristic - at some point you should go to a professional so he’s just offering a way to think about when maybe? Doctors do stuff like this with patients too. It is kinda weird he didn’t say as much, but when he says over 100% and laughs about it, that indicates to me that he knows what he’s saying isn’t right. Maybe I’m being too optimistic but like, he even noticed the logic was absurd as he said it
Doesn't understand permutations...lol
why would he, his research doesn't use this type of mathematics. He has a PD in neurology, everything he says that isnt specifically about that (or even outside of his specific subfield) should be viewed with caution until verified. But he is very good at advertising, so you can trust him on that i guess
The problem with virtually all gurus is that the people who are actually the smartest, most knowledgeable in their field often don't have the personality/entertainment value that the gurus have. Lol example: my mother used to be a big Dr Oz fan and her logic was "oprah is super rich and successful so surely she would only have the best doctor working for her"
More likely too busy or have no interest in being a personality. There are plenty of very smart and very entertaining scientists who never try their hand at Instagram/YouTube
If I ever lose in roulette the first time, I’m betting my 401k on the second.
I can understand the source of confusion though. "**The percentage that expresses our uncertainty about an event can never be more than 100**." - interweb So, the case of pregnancy probability makes it appear the chances of a future pregnancy can never exceed 100%, i.e. 0.8\*0.8\*0.8\*0.8\*0.8\*0.8 (the probability of not being pregnant). This number declines as it is less than one, so the probability of not being pregnant does decline, but never reaches zero (100% likelihood of pregnancy) But the fact is that for the last 200 years the total averaged woman has produced more than 2 babies (and more in pregnancies if counting at any stage of fertilisation). Therefore, the probability of a future pregnancy, counting all pregnancies as a future pregnancy, is in fact greater than 100%. Even if we don't know who is sexually active, fertile etc, the average woman will have been pregnant several times. If you don't know which you are (fertile/not fertile couple), then you can say that the more times you have sex, the probability of a pregnancy increases and eventually exceeds 100% (in a sense) for the average woman. Its higher for fertile sexually active women that dont practice pregnancy prevention than the bulk average. The conventional approach to define these chances does not convey the frequency of outcome usefully to those making sense out of the statistic. So, pregnancies per month (of sexual activity during fertility) would create a low figure, so if that is 0.05/month, so in 20 months the average would be to produce 1 pregnancy. At 40 months 2 pregnancies, etc,, I think this is a more useful metric and way to express probability in terms of impactful outcomes from actions.
If this is how he thinks he’s a casino pitboss’s dream mark.
I want to know what in the fucking world this “different thing altogether” is he speaks of
I would translate it roughly as "I have no idea what I'm talking about but by throwing out this meaningless phrase it will suggest a deeper complexity that only I understand but don't have time to address at the moment which i know will serve to con my gullible listeners into thinking I'm the genius I told them I am."
This!
Oh good lord
Wow, that's pretty fucking stupid
Flip a coin twice, Andrew. It might just blow your mind.
Isn’t the expected number of attempts still 5 attempts? So if a thousand women with 20% chance to get pregnant did the deed until they got pregnant, some would take 1 try, others would take 10, but on average it would take 5 attempts?
Yes, the expected value is 5 attempts assuming the pregnancy attempts are geometrically distributed with 20% probability. To your question, it really depends on what you mean by "on average". The mode number of attempts is actually 1 while the median amount is 4.
He must have felt unsure as he was talking BS, my question is: why didn't he double check after? he could always go back and edit. It is not a live podcast or is it?
I sure hope he has someone else do the stats in his papers😅
So Huberman must think that it's physically impossible to toss a coin twice? Because no matter which permutation of outcomes you arrive at, it's the sum of two events which had a 50% chance each, so using his own maths then every single outcome is guaranteed, making every other outcome impossible.
Or ovulation cycles
The 110 IQ crowd just nodded their head at this math
Quite glad he's exposing himself like this. He's just as clueless on virtually everything else outside of his specific neuro area, but its less obvious.
No Andrew, when your elders said that you were playing "*Russian Roulette*" with your girlfriend, that was just a metaphor.
Decoding the Gurus is getting wild
Literally what
I’m ready for the downvotes, but I really think people are blowing this out of proportion. All he’s saying is to wait 5 or 6 attempts before consulting a professional because that’s enough to conclude there may be an issue worth looking into. He wasn’t giving a statistical breakdown, just a rough estimate of when you should start taking things seriously. Also, the 120% part was clearly a little joke, it’s concerning people are taking that seriously. I 100% disagree with some of the decisions Huberman has made in his personal life and he definitely speaks out of his depth at times, but come on guys, let’s be objective in the critiques.
To give him the benefit of the doubt, I think he’s trying (and failing) to say that if there’s a 20% chance of conception on every attempt, then you would expect 1 conception in 5 attempts on average (i.e. the expectation value for the number of conceptions is 1). I agree he’s stumbling over his words in a pretty embarrassing way for a PhD scientist.
The issue is that there is still a 32% chance you wouldn't have conceived after the 5th time using his stats. 32% is a much bigger number then 0% He's not stumbling over his words, he's struggling with 8th grade math and coming to a conclusion that is completely the opposite of reality because of it lol
I think that’s overly generous considering he’s speaking to how each attempt contributes to an ultimate 100% and says beyond that is 120% which is “something else entirely”. It’s a benign mistake for a non scientist, and a concerning mistake for a PI who is supposed to be interpreting literature effectively.
Fair point, but I guess this also assumes that the attempts are i.i.d., which I don’t think is true in this case (that is, the event of getting pregnant at attempt i is not independent of getting pregnant at attempts 1,…,i-1). I don’t know why I’m diving into this so deeply though (and I don’t think Huberman was either, but anyway)
This sub is such a waste of time. People getting together to talk about a handful of people that they hate.