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Teaching an intelligent guy about a basic statistics concept
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.
For example, he believes that if you flip a coin 10 times and get 10 heads, you're slightly more likely to get a tails next time since 11 heads in a row is very unlikely. This is an intelligent guy, but I can't get to him on this. I'm not a good teacher. What approach do you reccomend? I've tried the "you're adjudicating a mystical power to the coin", the "the past doesn't influence the future in this way", and the "new information about the way things went affects how you project the long term result, so you can't expect to go 100 heads and 100 tails on average for 200 flips after you've gotten 10 heads in a row"; but none of these seem to work. |
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