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 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

No! Bad treefrog.

If it "feels like" something, you're probably fooling yourself.

Hard evidence. The easiest person to fool is yourself.

Edit: people, please don't down vote treefrog. They are learning, and I am joking.

Be nice. This place is way toxic. I'm not sure how much more I can handle it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I read the beginning of the article. It confirmed my gut feeling. But I certainly didn't run 300k coin flips to check lol

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Jokes on me! I doubt most of my decisions and the logic that lead up to them!

Evidenced based research ftw, though.

[–] PetDinosaurs -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you're still young, careful about too much imposter syndrome.

It took me until some reasonably extreme events for me to acknowledge that I was smart.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’m being a bit facetious. It took me quite a while, and with the help of my best friend, to realize I am smart. I don’t like to say that sort of thing. I am smart when it comes to the things that I know well, but am clueless on so much else.

[–] PetDinosaurs 1 points 1 year ago

Exactly.

Just making sure.

I had a lot of trouble gathering that confidence as well until I got into industry.