Saturday, March 30, 2013

What are the odds?

The Ad Council has been running ads for the autism world for several months now.  You've probably seen them.  They contrast the odds of being autistic as being much lower than the odds of some rare things, like becoming a professional athlete.  

In this week's NY Times Magazine the ad reads:
    Odds of becoming a top ranked Nascar driver: 1 in 125 billion
    Odds of being diagonsed with autism: 1 in 88.
Do you see anything strange here?  Last I looked there were over 6 billion people here and every year  there is at least one top-ranked Nascar driver.  How could the odds be 1 in 125 billion?

Will the Ad Council's copy reader be canned?

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Its even worse now. The new commercial says the odds of becoming a nascar driver is one in 125 billion.