Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Basenana

2021-10-17 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
Basenana
Votey panel for Basenana
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

This comic features a superhero parody. A hero tells a villain to "Stop, thief!" and the thief asks "What are you?" The hero responds: "Invincible." When pressed, he clarifies: "Statistically invincible."

He then explains his reasoning: "The base rate of death while wearing a suit made of bananas is literally zero. I cannot be killed!" The joke is a deliberate misuse of statistics -- just because no one has ever died while wearing a banana suit doesn't mean the suit provides any protection. This is a play on the base rate fallacy, where someone draws incorrect conclusions from statistical data by ignoring that the base rate is zero simply because almost no one has ever worn a banana suit, not because banana suits are protective.

In the final panel, the hero (now shown in his full banana suit costume) tells his wife "I updated my priors," a reference to Bayesian statistics where one updates probability estimates based on new evidence. The implication is that he has survived another day in the banana suit and now considers it even more protective -- doubling down on the faulty reasoning. The comic satirizes how statistical and probabilistic reasoning can be comically misapplied to reach absurd conclusions.

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