this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2023
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144
"Fair" coin flips appear to not be all that fair (arxiv.org)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by PetDinosaurs to c/technology
42 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

The paper shows some significant evidence that human coin flips are not as fair as I would have expected (plus probably a bunch of people would agree with me). There's always some probability that this happened by chance, but this is pretty low.

Of course, we should be able to build a really accurate coin flipping machine, but I never would have expected such a bias for human flippers.

This is why science is awesome and challenging your ideas is important.

Edit: hopefully this is not too wrong a place, but Lemmy is small, and I didn't know where else I could share such an exciting finding.

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[–] PetDinosaurs 87 points 1 year ago (3 children)

My favorite part is this:

Funding The authors have no funding to declare, and conducted this research in their spare time.

[–] wmassingham 43 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"Funding: my mom gave me the coins out of her car cupholder"

[–] PetDinosaurs 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I, too, was a poor grad student.

At that time I didn't have a child to suck the life out of me. Just a dissertation.

(My hypothesis is that the child is worse, but my wife won't let me conduct double blind, placebo controlled studies. Fortunately, we didn't have twins...)

[–] PetDinosaurs 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's just bizarre how high quality this evidence is. It's probably because it's so cheap to collect this data, and other science nerds are also science geeks like me.

Actual video of this many tests. Just data orgasm.

here it's not ready yet.

[–] CanofBeanz 6 points 1 year ago

with their spare change