[SpaceAce]

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I think I might have to take him up on his bet:


[14:15] b: I think you are having a difficult time moving from the narrow vision that a coin is 50/50. It will always be 50/50!

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Come on, you're making this up. No, I guess you're probably not making it up.

Every time I determine to be done with this silly argument, your friend manages to say something stupid enough to compel me to reply. The probability of a given coinflip outcome cannot be both 50/50 AND weighted toward one outcome over the other. How can your friend seriously say "It will always be 50/50!" and then go on to say that he can predict coinflips because the coin will be biased toward one outcome over the other? Unless your friend has has some understanding of nth-dimensional reality that the rest of us lack, there is no way for the probability of the coin landing heads to be both 50/50 and 52/48 or 60/40 or whatever.

This, though, is truly the central jewel in your friend's crown of ignorance:

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It doesn't matter that I have been absent for all the coin flips in a life time, I should be able to jump in at any moment, and grab a sample. and within that sample there will be a % that is working its way to 50%. So regardless, if a coin is flipped and shows heads 100 times in a row, I will put my money on tails. It is still 50/50. if it flips head again, I will bet double on the next flip that it will be tails, and so forth, but it is still a 50/50 chance.

[14:20] b: the rest is me making an educated guess on what the next flip may be on past events.
[14:22] b: what creates the past event is the human interaction with the coin being flipped, or the cards being shuffled

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Here, your friend is claiming that the million or billion flips the coin experienced in its lifetime are of absolutely no significance but that the ten flips he himself "jumps in" and witnesses are. How absurd is that? Your friend truly believes that you can predict ("make an educated guess") a future coinflip based on the coin's previous flips but he also believes that only the flips he has personally witnessed matter in determining what will happen next. Does your friend, perchance, have a healthier than average ego? Your friend then throws in a little Martingale for good measure. He ends the bulk of his message by acknowledging that 50/50 nature of the proposition and then goes on to once again claim he can make an "educated guess" at what is more likely to happen, the 50% event or the other 50% event. Huh?

Finally, do I even have to point out how completely and utterly his final statement has nothing to do with anything discussed? It doesn't matter what created the past events because those past events have no effect on future outcomes.

SpaceAce