71–80 of 193 posts
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.
[1] https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/157/Papers/diaconis_co...
There's a nice presentation of the paper here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QjgvbvFoQA In essence the effect comes from "precession" - the tendency of the flip to not be purely vertical but to have some wobble/angular momentum which causes it to flip in such a way as to spend longer on one side than the other. Depending on the technique this will have a greater or lesser effect on the fairness of the coin toss, ra…
Ah man, please use Bayesian statistics there... Well, the presenter says he doesn't know much about statistics.
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Well, I suppose if you need fodder to fill your CV, this is one way to do it.
Especially on LinkedIn! A single person would write 17000 posts about their "amazing journey" coin flip outcomes, and another 17001 "humbled by success" coin flip outcomes
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It's also impossible to prove that a given coin is not being controlled by an AI. (Or a deity.)
Yes, which is why you can only trust abstract coins that exist in a formal system which assumes independent tosses :) If you require true randomness without any assumptions this is not the universe for you.
I wouldn't be surprised if there is something to it, but I suspected they didn't use legitimate coin flips (because it seems like a large amount of people can't really flip a coin), and looking at the videos confirms it, at least for the flips done by Bartos: https://osf.io/6a5hy/ They're very low RPM and very low time in the air. Nothing I would accept for any decision worth flipping a coin for.
That's not tossing a coin, that's barely throwing it in the air. To me this kills the credibility of the entire study and of the authors. Sure, there may be something to it, but people will have a very different thing on their mind unless they check the video, which I wouldn't have done without your prompting. It's unlikely they don't understand how misleading it is. And somehow I have the intuition a proper coin tos…
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.
So if computation in the enclosing universe got more expensive, they'd enable more aggressive optimizations, and we'd see the effect get stronger?
It is time to stop the show, probabilities cannot prove specifics. Aka they cannot prove that the coin I hold is fair or not. We can only get trends for big populations.
There is only one way to prove if a coin is fair. Measure the actual thing that matters. In this case mass distribution. And if the measurement is inaccurate, then count atoms. One by one.
anyone else thinking about Pokemon TCGP...
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This was my first objection as well. However, if most people flip coins like that, then the measurements are valid -- the conclusions are about what average people will do, not a perfect mechanical coin flip. Otherwise you're falling in the no true coin flip fallacy.
Yeah, if I'm actually forced to use a coin instead of a computer system, I try to ping the thing off the ceiling and at least one wall (not in that order). Hitting various other things is a benefit, not a downside.
Craps is also brought to mind where the dice have to bump the back wall