Hello! Happy Mother's Day to all you fabulous moms who do way more than you should, get thanked way less than you ought, and are waaaaaay underpaid to listen to complaints about dinner! Mother's Day is this Sunday and I'm excited! My husband is really great about remembering flowers and gifts, unless he's not. Sometimes he forgets, like we all do sometimes. Are presents your love language? There's the book (you can check it out on Amazon here), the Five Love Languages, that talks about how we give and expect to receive love. When I read it, I had a revelation! We often show love by how we want to be loved. I found out my husband's love language is acts of service after about, you know, 20 years of marriage when I finally figured out why he loves to help people all the time. It's his way of showing love. (My love language is time, by the way. I love to just sit and be with people I love. No need to get my presents, although I like those too. But if
So... if I'm looking at that correctly, that can be simplified to:
ReplyDeleteO*w*t*c*2/l
So... the more talented the writer, the less likely to be a NYTBS? ;)
More theoretically....
If the probability of being a NYTBS depends on O, w, t, c, l, then we want the conditional probability:
P(NYTBS|O,w,t,c,l) (ie: the probability of being of NYTBS, given O, w, t, c, l).
But that's a difficult quantity to obtain, because we can readily measure is the probability of O, w, t, c, and l given that you're a NYTBS. That is, how many original, talented, etc. books don't actually make it to the NYTBS list? We don't really know... but we /could/ go take a survey of the books that /have made/ the best seller list and examine at least the frequency of talent, weirdness, looking at submission dates to get a sense of timing, etc. So, what we can readily measure is:
P(O,w,t,c,l|NYBS).
Probability calculus to the rescue!
Because:
P(O,w,t,c,l,NYBS) = P(O,w,t,c,l|NYBS)*P(NYBS)
P(NYTBS,O,w,t,c,l) = P(O,w,t,c,l|NYTBS)*P(NYTBS)
Putting it all together with a bit of Bayes' rule/theorem:
P(NYTBS|O,w,t,c,l) = P(O,w,t,c,l|NYTBS)*P(NYTBS)/ P(O,w,t,c,l)
Which says:
the probability of being a NYTBS given O, w, t, c, l is the Probability of O, w, t, c, l given NYTBS times the "prior probability" of being a NYTBS, over the marginal probability of O, w, t, c, l.
We'll use some very simplifying assumptions here, and say that O, w, t, c, and l are independent (note that's probability not true... originality and weird factor are probably not perfectly independent, and talent is probably not independent of the other two, but it depends on what sort of talent we're talking about).
Then we have:
P(NYTBS|O,w,t,c,l) = P(O,w,t,c,l|NYTBS)*P(NYTBS)/ (P(O)*P(w)*P(t)*P(c)*P(l))
Cheers. :)
because figuring out the probability wasn't hard enough in the first place...
ReplyDeleteThere, Rob you could publish that as a novel.
ReplyDelete