How to “Predict” the Gender of a Future Child

A long time ago, before anyone ever heard about ultrasound, there was a psychic who could predict the gender of a future child. No one ever filed a complaint against him.

The psychic had a journal in which he wrote the client’s name and the gender of the future child. The beauty of the scam was that what he wrote in the journal was the opposite gender that he had predicted. Whenever a client complained that the gender was wrong, he would show the journal and argue that the client had misunderstood.

Happy clients don’t return to complain.

Oh, the power of conditional probability! It is useful to understand it to run scams or to expose them.

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