False-positive Memes

The statistician is smugly grinning because they know something the others don't—Bayes' Theorem just crashed the panic party! With a disease prevalence of 1/1,000,000 and a test that's 97% accurate, your chances of actually having the disease are microscopic. Even with a positive test, there's a 99.997% chance you're perfectly fine! The false positive rate absolutely demolishes the actual disease probability. This is why statisticians roll their eyes when doctors freak out over rare disease test results without considering the base rate fallacy. Numbers don't lie, but they sure can be misleading without proper statistical context!