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392 points seanhunter | 8 comments | | HN request time: 0.931s | source | bottom
1. seanhunter ◴[] No.42181349[source]
There's a nice presentation of the paper here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QjgvbvFoQA

In essence the effect comes from "precession" - the tendency of the flip to not be purely vertical but to have some wobble/angular momentum which causes it to flip in such a way as to spend longer on one side than the other. Depending on the technique this will have a greater or lesser effect on the fairness of the coin toss, ranging from about p_same = 0.508 for the best technique to one person in the study actually exhibiting 0.6 over a large sample which is staggeringly unlikely if the toss was purely fair. In the extreme, it shows in the video a magician doing a trick toss using precession that looks as if it's flipping but does not in fact change sides at all, purely rotating in the plane of the coin and wobbling a bit.

The video is quite a nice one for setting out how hypothesis testing works.

replies(2): >>42184069 #>>42184189 #
2. yread ◴[] No.42184069[source]
link to the "wobble flip" trick https://youtu.be/-QjgvbvFoQA?t=325
replies(1): >>42186234 #
3. Vecr ◴[] No.42184189[source]
Ah man, please use Bayesian statistics there... Well, the presenter says he doesn't know much about statistics.
replies(2): >>42185456 #>>42186174 #
4. drcwpl ◴[] No.42185456[source]
This can be really relevant in various fields, statistics, gambling, and decision-making. I like the fact that they imply the importance of considering potential biases in seemingly random events.
5. seanhunter ◴[] No.42186174[source]
The paper does use Bayesian statistics. Presenter is a pure maths PhD.
replies(1): >>42188619 #
6. pinko ◴[] No.42186234[source]
I think you accidentally linked to the same video as the parent comment...

I bet this is the video you mean? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-L7KOjyDrE

replies(1): >>42186478 #
7. swores ◴[] No.42186478{3}[source]
They linked to the same video, but to a specific timestamp within it - by adding '?t=325' to the URL, which tells Youtube to play the video from 5m25s rather than from the beginning.
8. Vecr ◴[] No.42188619{3}[source]
I don't think I was clear, but I was only talking about the presenter's attempted explanation of the statistics of this problem.