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.
My favorite part is this:
Funding The authors have no funding to declare, and conducted this research in their spare time.
I remember it feeling this way as a kid. That coins tend to land on the same side they start on.
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.
Jokes on me! I doubt most of my decisions and the logic that lead up to them!
Evidenced based research ftw, though.
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.
I remember the opposite: heads always felt like “right way up” to us, but the result was almost always tails no matter who flipped it. To the extent that it still feels like the heads/tails percentage is the only positive version of the 50-50-90 rule, and I will never choose anything else.
Probably confirmation bias. But I wonder if the people in my family are wobblier than others.
I’m with you, i used to try influence what i wanted by catching it.
If i wanted what i had flipped from i caught it palm up and then revealed. If i wanted the opposite i caught it and then revealed it onto my other hand.
As i got older i wouldn’t let people catch the coin only let it hit the ground and bounce around.
Now I wanna know if I can get better at landing on the same side on purpose…
I suspect you can, if there is a bias when no effort is applied I suspect you can train to increase it. I can think of two main factors at play - how fast the coin is rotating and how long it remains in the air. Both of which are under your control and I suspect you can train to become more reliable for though it might take a lot of effort. Or you can just learn to do this in 10 mins. Who is going to know the difference? It is cheating either way.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Or you can just learn to do this in 10 mins
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I have actually tried and practised that when I was a kid :-)
Humans inherently create patterns and routine in their actions. It’s why on roulette wheels they change the direction and the size of the ball regularly to prevent the spinners from pattern spinning.
They don’t all inherently choose to make it land on the up facing side. In fact, I believe this study is not even true. I call shenanigans.
