Comment by blowski
4 years ago
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.
4 years ago
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.