Teaching an intelligent guy about a basic statistics concept

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A friend of mine who has a decent understanding of statistics believes that since random results will average out in the long run, when there's a variation from the standard, it will tend to go the other way in the future.

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it doesn't have to go the other way in the future...imagine it goes 100 tails in a row to start...now it's 100% tails and 0% heads...he's thinking that there should now be 100 more heads than tails over the next 'long run' set of flips to 'even it out'

that's incorrect


what if it now goes 10mil heads to 10mil tails? that 100 no longer is significant...10mil heads to 10mil+100 tails is still 50/50 (49.99975% heads)...get it to billions etc and it's even closer

so no, it doesn't have to 'even out'...

and no matter how u look at it, there is no memory, so it's always 50/50 in any individual coinflip

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I like this explanation. It works well for the Monty Hall riddle too.




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