Fighter pilot victories in clear-air combat are rare; it follows that they are Poisson-distributed, and that you would expect to have a few extreme outliers and a great mass of apparent "non-killers" even if every pilot was doing his genuine best to kill. That is even before taking into account pilot skill, which for all we know has a very wide range.
Fighter pilot victories in clear-air combat are rare; it follows that they are Poisson-distributed, and that you would expect to have a few extreme outliers and a great mass of apparent "non-killers"
I don't see how that follows at all. You don't know it was a Poisson distribution (there are lots of distributions natural phenomena follow; the negative binomial and lognormal also pop up a lot in human contexts), and even if you did, you don't know the the relevant rate parameter lambda to know how many pilots should be expected to have 1 success...
It is the beginning of a new year, and time for the beginning of a new rationality quotes thread.
The rules are: