Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

No design inference allowed on coin flips

Share
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Flipboard
Print
Email
Heads Or Tails Stock Photo
Courtesy Free Digital Photos

Not here, that’s for sure:

Toucher & Rich Explore How The Patriots Are Winning Coin Flips At ‘Impossible’ Rate

The Patriots have won 19 of their last 25 coin tosses. This has caught the nation’s attention.

Why? In the world of Darwinian evolution (natural selection acting on random mutation generates huge levels of information, not noise) and Boltzmann brains, only people who are ignorant, backward, bigoted, and easy to command would even dare wonder about this.*

“Lucky or good? Patriots winning coin tosses at nearly impossible rate,” said Yahoo.

“Patriots have no need for probability, win coin flip at impossible clip,” CBSSports said.

Obviously because this is the Patriots, a simple explanation like “that is the potential nature of a 50-50 probability” just doesn’t cut it. That’s because, according to CBS Sports, the probability of winning it at least 19 out of 25 times is 0.0073 — less than three-quarters of one percent! More.

Just like: Lottery luck exceeds number of electrons in universe? But isn’t that precisely what naturalism teaches about everything?

A naturalist atheist establishment promotes acceptance of a universe where our brains are shaped for fitness, not for truth, so there is no underlying logic we can draw on. (It may be there, but we can’t legitimately draw on it.)

Many people fail to realize the implications of this underlying assumption, as it spreads through society. What was once a superstition is now Top Science.

And if the tax-funded school systems go at it strenuously enough, superstition will continue to rise, along with naturalism.

See also: Imagine a world of religions that naturalism might indeed be able to explain

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Comments
Wow! I don't understand it. But the concept of a reconciliation of a QM discovery and pure mathematics is beautiful.Axel
November 10, 2015
November
11
Nov
10
10
2015
03:51 PM
3
03
51
PM
PDT
OT:
New derivation of pi links quantum physics and pure math - November 10, 2015 Excerpt: "At the lower energy orbits, the path of the electron is fuzzy and spread out," Hagen explained. "At more excited states, the orbits become more sharply defined and the uncertainty in the radius decreases." From the formula for the limit of the variational solution as the energy increased, Hagen and Friedmann were able to pull out the Wallis formula for pi. The theory of quantum mechanics dates back to the early 20th century and the Wallis formula has been around for hundreds of years, but the connection between the two had remained hidden until now. http://phys.org/news/2015-11-derivation-pi-links-quantum-physics.html
bornagain
November 10, 2015
November
11
Nov
10
10
2015
02:21 PM
2
02
21
PM
PDT
What design inference should we draw from these coin flips? Who is being prevented from drawing them? Who is preventing them?FierceRoller
November 10, 2015
November
11
Nov
10
10
2015
07:22 AM
7
07
22
AM
PDT
Thanks, Bob O'H, this is quite an interesting problem.daveS
November 10, 2015
November
11
Nov
10
10
2015
05:26 AM
5
05
26
AM
PDT
Now that someone has noticed, I'm waiting to see how often it happens to one and the same team in the future. The Emperor Nero once won every competition in the Olympic Games. It was not reported of other emperors, so far as I know. Whattan accident, right?News
November 10, 2015
November
11
Nov
10
10
2015
04:07 AM
4
04
07
AM
PDT
cantor & daveS - yes, whoever made that calculation was naive. I'm sure some here will see the connection to some of the arguments used in ID. The probability that any of the 32 teams had at least 19 heads in their last 25 tosses is about 21% (I suspect the correct calculation is not the simple one, but that the answers wouldn't be too different). I'm not going to think about it for the last 10 years because the combinatorics get messy.Bob O'H
November 10, 2015
November
11
Nov
10
10
2015
12:27 AM
12
12
27
AM
PDT
Under inflated coin? Did the Pats have access to the coin pre-toss?ppolish
November 9, 2015
November
11
Nov
9
09
2015
12:59 PM
12
12
59
PM
PDT
Oops---indexing problem. I believe the percentages are more like 18% and 34%, respectively.daveS
November 9, 2015
November
11
Nov
9
09
2015
08:33 AM
8
08
33
AM
PDT
Addendum to #2: I'm getting the chance for any single team to have a streak of at least 19 out of 25 wins of tosses in 10 years of regular season games to be roughly 29% already. And the chance of this happening over 20 years is a bit over 50%.daveS
November 9, 2015
November
11
Nov
9
09
2015
08:00 AM
8
08
00
AM
PDT
"according to CBS Sports, the probability of winning it at least 19 out of 25 times is 0.0073" . I wonder who is the math genius at CBS that made that calculation. .cantor
November 9, 2015
November
11
Nov
9
09
2015
06:30 AM
6
06
30
AM
PDT
While it is true that (assuming a fair coin) the probability of a particular team winning 19 or more tosses out of a particular 25 games is about 0.73%, there are 32 teams in the NFL each playing 16 regular season games per year, so there are many opportunities for this to happen. As a very crude (under) estimate, I get that the chances of this sort of streak happening with some NFL team in the last 10 years to be over 50%. I would like to see a better number from a person more expert in stats than me.daveS
November 9, 2015
November
11
Nov
9
09
2015
06:00 AM
6
06
00
AM
PDT
I'm not sure what point News (I assume this is Mrs O'Leary) is trying to make. Is she suggesting that the 19/25 heads is impossible (or close to?), and thus there is a non-material explanation?Bob O'H
November 9, 2015
November
11
Nov
9
09
2015
05:40 AM
5
05
40
AM
PDT

Leave a Reply