It's highly likely that at least one celebrity faked his/her death and succeeded at it.

I'm sorry all but your math is way off. The probability that at least one (currently alive) celebrity from the entire population of celebrities faked their death would be:

P(at least one faked death) = P(1 faked death) + P(2 faked death) + ... = 1 - P(0 faked death) = 1, is what the post claims.

Now, there is no way to actually calculate P(0 faked death) for a population, because these kinds of probabilities are observed from data through samples. You could try to calculate it by obtaining a sample, but once you find even one death faked, then OP's point is proven, since someone faked their death within the population. This would be done before any actual math can be done.

However once you know what the population looks like, you CAN calculate the probability of any number of celebrities faking their death within a sample. Let n denote total number of celebrities, m the total number of deaths faked, p the sample size and x the number of deaths faked for which we want a probability, then the total number of ways in which we can take p celebrities from the population of celebrities is n!/p!(n - p)!, which is n choose p, or nCp.

We get P(x faked death) = ( mCx * (n - m)C(p - x) ) / nCp

/r/Showerthoughts Thread Parent