<p>My brother has this dream of being a major league baseball player. He is really convinced that it is going to happen, but I keep telling him that he is good, but we’re talking about the major leagues. I also told him that he has a better chance of getting hit by lightning than being a pro athlete. he didn’t believe me, so I googled the odds of a lightning strike and came across this:</p>
<p>I was surprised by many of these odds, including the 77 to 1 chance that you will die in an auto accident withi the next year. This is lower than the chance of having a twin, and I know several sets of twins, including my own father who has an identical twin brother. So next time I’m driving, I have to remember this. This site also proved me wrong about the lightning strike vs. pro athlete thing.</p>
<p>I propose that the Chances threads on CC would be interesting if we used these odds as a way to evaluate chances. If a D student with an 1100 SAT (new style) asks for chances to Harvard, instead of saying “you have no chance,” a more creative approach would be “you’ll get in if a meteor hits your house.”</p>
<p>What do you think of some of these odds? What do think of the chances idea?</p>
<p>Definitely. Let someone else be the dream crusher if it doesn’t happen. </p>
<p>Just encourage him to work hard and hope that he can make it. Heck, if it were my brother, I’d probably be helping to find universities with high recruit rates and all that good stuff.</p>
<p>These odds assume that all these things happen at random - that all of us have an equal chance. Which of course just isn’t how the world works. E.g., people who live in areas where thunder storms are common have a much higher chance of being hit by lightning than those who live where thunder storms are rare.</p>
<p>In in your brother’s case, he will have a much better chance of being a major league player if he has say a 98 mph fastball than someone else who has only a 58 mph one.</p>
<p>I don’t mind him dreaming, but heis beginning to get annoying. I keep telling him that he should have a backup plan, in case his baseball career doesn’t work out. However, he is convinced that he’ll make the majors and is always bragging about how good he is at baseball. I just tell him the lightning strike story to remind him how hard it is to go pro. After this year, he moves up to the 13 to 16 year old division, so the competition will be much tougher. Maybe then he’ll se how tough it is. I always encourage him to do his best, but I always have to remind him that a career in the MLB isn’t a guarantee.</p>
<p>Let him dream, but make sure that doesn’t come at the expense of his schoolwork: he should have other excellent options to fall back on should his baseball dream fall out</p>
<p>I guess you see my point now. He was chosen for the All-Star team in the 10-12 league, so now he thinks he’s Derek Jeter or something. When we tell him that making it to the majors is very hard, he just says that he’ll settle for the minor leagues. Some of what he says can be kind iof funny.</p>
<p>Hm… I just figured out that there are 2,534,272,925,184,000 random combinations of letters that you can come up with using the letters from “College Confidential”. Someone please verify. :D</p>