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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[โ€“] wmassingham 43 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[โ€“] 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...)