> This is straight up false because you know a priori that the chance is 50-50. Not necessarily. As the article notes, the way humans normally toss coins, the

> This is straight up false because you know a priori that the chance is 50-50. Not necessarily. As the article notes, the way humans normally toss coins, the coin has about a 51% chance to land on the side that was facing up at the start of the toss. The more general point here is that the odds for a coin toss are not a property of the coin by itself; they are a property of the coin and the process that is used to toss it. IIRC E. T. Jaynes in his book on probability theory described experiments with a robotic coin flipper where it was found that the odds could be skewed quite significantly by properly designing and calibrating the flipper. > If you don’t know they’re independent and you’re trying to identify the pattern that’s just an experiment. Yes, I think most of the article would be better described as how to experimentally test for the actual odds of a process like repeated coin flips, given several possible hypotheses about how the process works. > Yeah they do. At the roulette table, all the time. Gamblers do this a lot, which is where it gets its name. Yes, the biggest missing piece I see in the article is any actual discussion of how actual gamblers in the real world behave.