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Fair coins tend to land on the side they started (2023)

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392 points seanhunter | 1 comments | 19 Nov 24 09:03 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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swayvil ◴[19 Nov 24 14:50 UTC] No.42184011[source]▶
This is clearly the law of conservation of reality at work.

Likewise, when you hear a word for the first time suddenly you hear it five times in a row. Or if you see somebody once you suddenly start running into them all over the place.

It's because it's cheaper to repeat past realities than to create new ones.

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Vecr ◴[19 Nov 24 14:52 UTC] No.42184035[source]▶
I don't think that's true, isn't this tested in a way to obviate that psychological effect? I've done coin-flipping in computer simulations and that doesn't happen. (And yes it was a bit more realistic vs a single element, multiple linked elements flip more realistically. No air resistance simulation though.)
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swayvil ◴[19 Nov 24 15:03 UTC] No.42184156[source]▶
Oh sure, let's doubt the evidence of our senses in favor of convention. That's good science.
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Vecr ◴[19 Nov 24 15:08 UTC] No.42184213[source]▶
How good are you at Bayesian statistics, conditionalization, and understanding various biases? The simulation here should be good (it's better than mine).
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swayvil ◴[19 Nov 24 15:29 UTC] No.42184514{3}[source]▶
Next you'll cite Bible verse.
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1. Vecr ◴[19 Nov 24 15:41 UTC] No.42184688{4}[source]▶
I don't think Bible verses are related.

There are multiple ways to ground Bayesian statistics without resorting to grounding in coin flips. The simplest one isn't that robust, there's a mathematical one but it's abstract and uses calculus, there's a quantum one but I'm not even going there, and there's a highly robust one that's too complex for me to understand.