Comment by JacobLinney
4 years ago
Yes it is irrational. That's a common statistical misconception, the key thing here is that every flip has a 60% chance of being heads.
The result of each flip is completely independent of what came before it. In your example the 7th flip is just as likely to be heads as the first flip, or any of the other 5 flips that landed on heads.
It says "a coin that would land heads 60% of the time". If it's already landed heads 60% of the time, I'd expect the remaining 40% for it to land on tails.
Thought experiment: in what way has it landed heads 60% of the time? It landed heads 100% of the trials so far, but the coin has no way of keeping track of that.
That's not a guarantee for any number of flips. For example, if you only flipped the coin one time, what does "60% of the time" even mean in that context? As your other replies have indicated, this is getting at the long-run frequency, meaning as you flip the coin more and more times, approaching infinity, the number of heads approaches 60%.
The key here is that it's expected to land heads 60% of the time. Take a normal coin, which is expected to land heads 50% of the time. If you flip a heads, do you instantly expect it to be tails next time? By your logic it would be impossible to ever flip heads twice in a row. Coins as a general rule aren't impacted by previous flips.