I wonder what the best way is to illustrate to those people that that coin example is ridiculous. It's so intuitive to us that the coin has no "memory". Howev

I wonder what the best way is to illustrate to those people that that coin example is ridiculous. It's so intuitive to us that the coin has no "memory". However, I could see why someone would think that 3 heads in a row mean the 4th will be more likely to be heads. If you didn't think about it much, it is a reasonable gut reaction to a layperson. What if you told the person this: "What if you flipped a coin and it had come up 3 heads in a row. Is it more likely that it'll come up heads again? Well, what if you waited a minute before you flipped it again? What about an hour? 20 years? Would the odds go back to 50/50 then? At what point does the coin 'forget' its previous flips?" I think putting it that way would help illustrate the absurdity of that way of thinking. As an aside, I think if I flipped a coin 100 times and it was heads all 100 times, I would be willing to make a big bet on the 101st flip being heads. The odds of getting 100 heads in a row is so much smaller than the odds that something is wrong with the system (the coin is weighted, there's some sleight of hand going on, etc).