Re: Just curious if this has anything to do with DERB
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Hey, I don't even play 3/6 let alone 30/60 but since this thread has actually forced someone to register in order to post in it, I thought I would chime in, too. I think you're missing the point of the analogy. No one is saying that you have to assume that the coins are all fair before you do the experiment. Let's say that you take 1000 coins and you flip them each 1000 times and you DON'T know whether they are fair or not. If you take the one that lands on heads most and try to make an argument that it MUST be weighted to land on heads more often by building a confidence interval, that argument will be wrong. That argument will be wrong because even IF all of the coins were fair coins, you would STILL expect one of them to land on heads a lot more often than tails. And by selecting that particular one to analyse, you are biasing your analysis. So you can't construct a confidence interval around its results by (implicitly) assuming that it was randomly chosen. That is what the analogy is supposed to show: that having someone perform extraordinarily can be explained even IF they are no different from anyone else.
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I agree with what you end with here, but MY POINT is that you DON'T know that he is "no different from anyone else." Additionally, I agree that you can't look at it as a completely isolated incident, but going to the other end of the spectrum and just assuming that the guy HAS to be a fluke is ignorant and teaches us nothing. If you're going base your argument and analysis on the assumption that he is just a bad player on a hot streak, then you're not going to learn why he might be beating the game in a different way that you are.
Respectfully,
Matt
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