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No bet! You promised me "infinite amounts of money", I only stand to win 20 bucks. Also, you have specified that these are 20 random people; so I guess I don'

No bet! You promised me "infinite amounts of money", I only stand to win 20 bucks. Also, you have specified that these are 20 random people; so I guess I don't get to brief them in advance that they MUST say manual each time. So you have replaced me, the bettor, with a panel of 20 people whose average IQ is 100, and who don't have my interests at heart. Why would I take that bet? If my random panel say manual each time, you stand to lose. But as I say, I don't bet often. Only once a year, only on gee-gees, and only as much as I'm willing to lose (because I always lose).

baobabKoodaa 5y ago
Look, you're merely pretending to disagree. You're pretending to believe something akin to "it's impossible to craft a sequence of numbers that convinces observes of its randomness". But you don't actually believe this [or whatever minor variation of that statement that you'd find agreeable in rhetoric]. If you did believe it, you would find a wager that we could do to settle this disagreement. But no such wager can possibly be formulated, because you don't actually believe what you pretend to believe.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  It's not about my beliefs, except my belief that the die is fair. I made a statement about a simple bet, using a fair 20-sided die, on the outcome of the 8th roll after the die has just come up 20 seven times. I'll take the bet that it doesn't come up 20 on the 8th roll. This scenario with 20 random people and 10 sequences appears to be a different scenario. I'm not sure how the odds work in that scenario, and I don't fancy that bet. That's all.
  - baobabKoodaa 5y ago
    > I made a statement about a simple bet, using a fair 20-sided die, on the outcome of the 8th roll after the die has just come up 20 seven times. I'll take the bet that it doesn't come up 20 on the 8th roll. How is this related to the topic at all? Our disagreement concerns the ability of humans to produce numbers that look random, our disagreement doesn't concern the ability of a fair die to produce numbers that look random. Of course a fair die is going to produce numbers that look random, that's not related to this discussion at all!
    - denton-scratch 5y ago
      It's related only to your challenge with a contrived and complicated betting scenario. "The topic" is whether the challenge faced by the experimental subjects makes any sense. It doesn't; the challenge is to produce a string of six symbols that others can't distinguish from randomness. There is no such string. Your contrived betting scenario doesn't illuminate the issue; it's an attempt to distract attention, and IMO it's not in good faith.
      - baobabKoodaa 5y ago
        > "The topic" is whether the challenge faced by the experimental subjects makes any sense. It doesn't; the challenge is to produce a string of six symbols that others can't distinguish from randomness. There is no such string. I strongly disagree with that statement. On a surface-level inspection, some strings appear to have more entropy than others ("can be distinguished from randomly generated strings"). This absolutely is a real thing, and it's measurably real. If you genuinely believe what you say, then we can easily wager on it and find out who's right. > Your contrived betting scenario doesn't illuminate the issue; it's an attempt to distract attention, and IMO it's not in good faith. You asked me to produce a specific betting scenario, and I did my best to entertain you with that. I crafted the scenario in good faith insofar as I tried my best to answer to your request. I suppose you can still argue that it's not in good faith because I never had any expectation that you would take the wager. But like I said before, that's because there is no way to formulate our disagreement as a betting scenario that you would accept, because you don't genuinely believe the claim you are making here, so you will simply weasel out of any wager.
        denton-scratch 5y ago
        I withdraw my accusation of bad faith, and I apologise for that remark. I call on you to withdraw your claim that my remarks were made in bad faith. I still don't know why you felt the need to contrive a complicated betting scenario, when we were discussing a "simpler" scenario that already involved an icosohedral die. If we're using betting scenarios to model good faith, then aren't simple scenarios more useful than complex ones? Ergo, coin-toss is the most appropriate. But trying to talk about this stuff in terms of physical things like coins or dice inevitably turns into discussion about unfair coins and crooked dice, or whether the caster can influence the outcome; so argument by analogy quickly leads to dead ends, in this area.
butwhywhyoh 5y ago
This is the telltale sign of someone who is wrong but refuses to admit it. They begin bringing up completely tangential points and ideas to distract from the original argument that they now realize they lost.

baobabKoodaa 5y ago

Look, you're merely pretending to disagree. You're pretending to believe something akin to "it's impossible to craft a sequence of numbers that convinces observes of its randomness". But you don't actually believe this [or whatever minor variation of that statement that you'd find agreeable in rhetoric]. If you did believe it, you would find a wager that we could do to settle this disagreement. But no such wager can possibly be formulated, because you don't actually believe what you pretend to believe.

denton-scratch 5y ago
It's not about my beliefs, except my belief that the die is fair. I made a statement about a simple bet, using a fair 20-sided die, on the outcome of the 8th roll after the die has just come up 20 seven times. I'll take the bet that it doesn't come up 20 on the 8th roll. This scenario with 20 random people and 10 sequences appears to be a different scenario. I'm not sure how the odds work in that scenario, and I don't fancy that bet. That's all.
- baobabKoodaa 5y ago
  > I made a statement about a simple bet, using a fair 20-sided die, on the outcome of the 8th roll after the die has just come up 20 seven times. I'll take the bet that it doesn't come up 20 on the 8th roll. How is this related to the topic at all? Our disagreement concerns the ability of humans to produce numbers that look random, our disagreement doesn't concern the ability of a fair die to produce numbers that look random. Of course a fair die is going to produce numbers that look random, that's not related to this discussion at all!
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    It's related only to your challenge with a contrived and complicated betting scenario. "The topic" is whether the challenge faced by the experimental subjects makes any sense. It doesn't; the challenge is to produce a string of six symbols that others can't distinguish from randomness. There is no such string. Your contrived betting scenario doesn't illuminate the issue; it's an attempt to distract attention, and IMO it's not in good faith.
    - baobabKoodaa 5y ago
      > "The topic" is whether the challenge faced by the experimental subjects makes any sense. It doesn't; the challenge is to produce a string of six symbols that others can't distinguish from randomness. There is no such string. I strongly disagree with that statement. On a surface-level inspection, some strings appear to have more entropy than others ("can be distinguished from randomly generated strings"). This absolutely is a real thing, and it's measurably real. If you genuinely believe what you say, then we can easily wager on it and find out who's right. > Your contrived betting scenario doesn't illuminate the issue; it's an attempt to distract attention, and IMO it's not in good faith. You asked me to produce a specific betting scenario, and I did my best to entertain you with that. I crafted the scenario in good faith insofar as I tried my best to answer to your request. I suppose you can still argue that it's not in good faith because I never had any expectation that you would take the wager. But like I said before, that's because there is no way to formulate our disagreement as a betting scenario that you would accept, because you don't genuinely believe the claim you are making here, so you will simply weasel out of any wager.
      - denton-scratch 5y ago
        I withdraw my accusation of bad faith, and I apologise for that remark. I call on you to withdraw your claim that my remarks were made in bad faith. I still don't know why you felt the need to contrive a complicated betting scenario, when we were discussing a "simpler" scenario that already involved an icosohedral die. If we're using betting scenarios to model good faith, then aren't simple scenarios more useful than complex ones? Ergo, coin-toss is the most appropriate. But trying to talk about this stuff in terms of physical things like coins or dice inevitably turns into discussion about unfair coins and crooked dice, or whether the caster can influence the outcome; so argument by analogy quickly leads to dead ends, in this area.

butwhywhyoh 5y ago

This is the telltale sign of someone who is wrong but refuses to admit it. They begin bringing up completely tangential points and ideas to distract from the original argument that they now realize they lost.