I knew absolutely nothing of Benford's law before this post. I am just telling you he said subsequent digits followed the law as well. If he is wrong about that, then I retract my claim.
I clearly see the point that Benford's does not apply if you have all numbers only between 100-999. As it would make lotteries impossible. Or give premium to betting on numbers between 100-199.
Subsequent digits from the left may follow the law, but that doesn't mean it applies to the last two digits. I can see why you'd intuit that it should be applicable since if you keep going to through the subsequent digits, you eventually cover them all including the last two.
But the key insight you missed is that as the data crosses multiple orders of magnitude, the reading order (left to right) itself starts to matter. The second digit in 2319 is in the hundreds, while the second digit in 12319 is in the thousands. Meanwhile, if you were to look at the last digit instead, it doesn't change as you increase the orders of magnitude. It's always in the ones.
Indeed, the last digit is nine in both cases when looking at it from the right, but if you were to look at it from the left, it's the 4th digit in the first case and the 5th digit in the second case. That's why Benford's law would not be applicable to something that specifies "last digits" rather than "first digits".
Also realizing this is how "numbers rackets" worked. It was always the last digits of some publicly available data.. i.e, last three digits of the Dow Jones I think it one my dad help out on when he was a kid in the 50s. Before the states ran lotteries, number rackets were at every job site.
I knew absolutely nothing of Benford's law before this post. I am just telling you he said subsequent digits followed the law as well. If he is wrong about that, then I retract my claim.
I clearly see the point that Benford's does not apply if you have all numbers only between 100-999. As it would make lotteries impossible. Or give premium to betting on numbers between 100-199.
Subsequent digits from the left may follow the law, but that doesn't mean it applies to the last two digits. I can see why you'd intuit that it should be applicable since if you keep going to through the subsequent digits, you eventually cover them all including the last two.
But the key insight you missed is that as the data crosses multiple orders of magnitude, the reading order (left to right) itself starts to matter. The second digit in 2319 is in the hundreds, while the second digit in 12319 is in the thousands. Meanwhile, if you were to look at the last digit instead, it doesn't change as you increase the orders of magnitude. It's always in the ones.
Indeed, the last digit is nine in both cases when looking at it from the right, but if you were to look at it from the left, it's the 4th digit in the first case and the 5th digit in the second case. That's why Benford's law would not be applicable to something that specifies "last digits" rather than "first digits".
Thank you for the explanation.
Also realizing this is how "numbers rackets" worked. It was always the last digits of some publicly available data.. i.e, last three digits of the Dow Jones I think it one my dad help out on when he was a kid in the 50s. Before the states ran lotteries, number rackets were at every job site.
No prob!