science bets
people have this idea that science is pure and 100% reproducible. well, it's not. it's a messy business of taking measurements. every measurement has some variation to it. some of the errors are from the observer, jitter, quantum mechanics, inherent in the system, and literally more sources than i can list in this tiny post. so scientists take many measurements to come up with a best guess average. however, that average is pretty useless in a scientific sense unless you know two other things: the error bar and the confidence level. if you repeat my experiment you'll get a result that's within 1% of my result 95% of the time. which means that 5% of the time someone's gonna get an outlier result that doesn't conform to my results. that's okay. that's the way things work. it's part of doing science. a graph of the results sorta looks like a haystack. the outliers are those "needles" away from the main pile. you can think of it as making a bet. you can bet on the outliers for religious/political reasons if you want. but i'm gonna be so rich.