Dagon comments on Open Thread May 16 - May 22, 2016 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: Elo 15 May 2016 11:35PM

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Comment author: Romashka 22 May 2016 10:00:55AM 2 points [-]

A stupid question... If I ask people (n = several hundreds to thousand) to put a coin down on the table such that it wouldn't roll away, heads or tails up... I expect the overall results to be near 1:1 ratio of heads to tails... But it wouldn't be as random as when I (or they) just tossed the coin on the table, right?

Comment author: Dagon 22 May 2016 04:34:57PM 1 point [-]

If none of the participants can predict or influence the 50/50 outcome, then it's random. The procedure for generating the state doesn't matter - only that the individual events cannot be predicted and the aggregate converges toward a distribution.