With your two assumptions, if Obama only attended one service a year, the odds of him attending the one of Wright's offensive sermons wouldn't be very high. And if Obama was at every service, than the odds that he was at one of the 20 would be 100%.
Its all about how often Obama went and how often he didn't go, but your analysis misses that factor entirely. You can't just take the number of offensive sermons over the 20 year period, make it X, and say the odds are 1 in 2^X, it doesn't work that way. It only works that way if there is a 50/50 (1 in 2)chance of Obama being at any particular service. But the chance may have been 1% or 99%.
Assume Obama went to 10% of the sermons (and that both Obama's attendance, and Wright's offensiveness where randomly distributed).
The odds that Obama missed one offensive sermon would be 90%. For each additional offensive sermon multiple by .9, so if there where 10 extremely offensive sermons, the odds of missing them all would be 34.8%. If there where 20, than the odds would be 12.15%, 40 would give you under one an a half percent.
10% attendance seems rather favorable to Obama's claims, but absent other evidence we should give him some benefit of the doubt.
If you assume Obama went to half of them than the first sermon would be a 50% chance of being missed, and it only takes about 6 offensive sermons to get down to around one and a half percent. I think your math is valid for the 50% assumption, but you don't state a 50% attendance assumption. |
