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We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
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Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
#92Very interesting, and I think this part sums up the crux: “The researchers believe that you can only analyze the raw responses because, statistically, any sequence is equally likely to occur, so where do you draw the line?” I’d say that, as it is a psychological study, making claims about a human behavior, treating humans as pure random number generators without considering _intent_ is a mistake. It is entirely possi…
I think they are being overly kind. The conclusion itself shouldn’t be sensitive to just removing the all H if all T answers. Since their trend disappears from removing just those answers, were only left with the far more mundane “older people are more likely to write all Hs or Ts”. The true conclusion was hidden by the averaging that goes on when you make a best fit line.
Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
#93> As for our initial idea to make an age-guessing game, we have guessed right 51% of the time. Pretty much what we had expected . Yeah... you thought I was 60. Seems from the comments this is a common thing. You might want to check your algorithms. But then again, you do say in the end of the results that you need more 60+ year olds to help make this more accurate. Also, a bone to pick. You claim that people get less…
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Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
#94I was trying to find a mental way to do a true coin toss. Anyone has ideas for how to truly dig into some randomness? Maybe most would think it's impossible, but aren't we at least better placed to do this better than deterministic machines (or maybe we are not - the true free will debate :)?
Look around the room for objects in sight. For each object, take its common name and count how many of the letters are "odd" letters acegikmoqsuwy, then mod 2. "Window" -> "wiow" -> 4 -> 0. Each word yields a single bit of very slow, pretty good entropy. Don't do this in the same room twice.
Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
#95Beautifully crafted web page. For any experimental science, the integrity of experiment (thus reliability of data) is important. For experiments with human subjects, the question is whether the subjects answered the questions in good faith. A sequence like 'HHHHHHHHHH' for the coin toss experiment looks like an answer in bad faith; it is mechanically easy to keep pressing the same button, and a subject is unlikely to…
This is not a sound approach. You're declaring what humans think random is first, and then throwing out any data that doesn't match your declaration. There is no way to learn anything from this. I also think 'HHHHHHHHHH' is unlikely to be a good faith response, but if the goal is to actually learn anything instead of merely reinforcing my prior beliefs, it doesn't matter. You need to find a way to design the experime…
You don't have to view it as "throwing out the data". You can just think of it as an alternative explanation for the data.
Original hypothesis: Old people are worse at giving random responses.
Alternative hypothesis: Old people are more likely give bad faith responses.
This review is suggesting the AH is equally good at explaining the data as the OH.
Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
#96My idea of what random actually looks like has been affected a lot by generating random numbers with a computer. They just don’t actually look that random. I read an anecdote about the iPod shuffle (hey kids - it was a music player with no screen so you could not choose songs directly) - they initially set it to be genuinely random in the way it chose the next song - people didn’t like it. It didn’t _feel_ random to…
Spotify had a blogpost about it back in the day[1]. It was based on prior work that's a bit more general[2]. The basic idea was that you don't really want to randomize, you want to distribute.
[1]: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-son... [2]: http://keyj.emphy.de/balanced-shuffle/
Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
#97I was trying to find a mental way to do a true coin toss. Anyone has ideas for how to truly dig into some randomness? Maybe most would think it's impossible, but aren't we at least better placed to do this better than deterministic machines (or maybe we are not - the true free will debate :)?
If you have two people, you can have person A ask person B to “pick a random number”, and use heads for odd, tails for even. Don’t tell person B why you’re asking and my guess is you’re relatively random heads/tails. No studies that I am aware of to back this up, so people could be biased towards odd/even, but a bias correction could correct that too.
I’d bet people generally think even numbers and multiples of 5 seem less random.
Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
#98The reason the trend line drops over 60 is that there are fewer people over 60 taking the test and thus, the questionable responses have a bigger influence. If you sample less from that cohort, it will be less likely that your sample is representative.
Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have two people, you can have person A ask person B to “pick a random number”, and use heads for odd, tails for even. Don’t tell person B why you’re asking and my guess is you’re relatively random heads/tails. No studies that I am aware of to back this up, so people could be biased towards odd/even, but a bias correction could correct that too.
I’d bet people generally think even numbers and multiples of 5 seem less random.
3 and 7 seem random :)
Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
#100I'd imagine it's hard to prove randomness. Yes, HHHHHHHHHH can be chosen randomly as equally as HHTHTHTTTH. I don't remember seeing anything in the article speaking to the statistical significance of the data...though, I'm not a scientist, so maybe it's inferred from the discussion of the results.