"Fair" coin flips appear to not be all that fair

PetDinosaurs@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 145 points –
arxiv.org

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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The illusion of a coin flipping in the air allows those that have mastered the act to get near 100% precision.

Crazy how simple and obvious that seems after you see it, but I never would have suspected it if someone did it right in front of me.

Omg. I must learn this.

Shit. I have zero cash in my house.

I tried for a few minutes, before my son got bored and wanted to move on 😜. If you do learn it, let us know!

How old is your son? I imagine I'll do the same, but this is the only magic trick that I've really wanted to learn. My son has some fine motor delays so he won't be able to do this.

I realized that I've interacted with you a few times here, so I ended up looking at your comment history. We seem to share a lot of similar characteristics.

I noticed that you're trans and had a Q&A. I'm cis-het and I missed that session. I hope that we'll interact again. I want to understand T as well as I understand LGB. I just don't know anyone T.

My boy is about 15 now. I miss the times when magic was, well, magic. I love the times we have now, and look forward to the future as well. But, I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t miss my little boy.

If you have any Q’s, ask away. I may do another AMA soon, for fun.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

illusion

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.