LegionOnomaMoi

That's true. But once again, that wasn't the question. You neatly cut off the actual question, so I'll post what I said about the coin toss problem in full, rather than your neatly edited version (emphasis added):
Note that I never said anybody was wrong for expecting a mix. Where in this post did I say where and why what "most people" say is wrong? It wasn't because they are wrong for understanding that a mix of heads and tails is more likely than all tails. I gave the results of 2 specific series of tosses, and then I said "most people would say the first is far more likely than the second. That's where they are wrong.

Moreover, this wasn't the post your responded to. When asked for clarification, I simplified:
This was the post your first responded to with the following:
In this post, I said nothing about what people expect to find. I simply gave two different results and asked which is more likely, and then answered. The answer is correct, yet either you know you are wrong and obstinately refuse to admit it, or you still really don't understand why you are wrong (perhaps because you aren't taking the time to read carefully and think about what I said in the post you originally responded to along with subsequent explanations).

You continue to talk about a problem I never posed and an question I never asked. I never asked whether a mix is more likely, nor did I ever say people who think so are wrong.

They are wrong because they do what it appears you continue to do: they can clearly see that one toss is a mix, and the other toss isn't, and they know the second one is very unlikely, so they miss the fact that I'm not asking whether a mix is more likely, but presenting 2 specific sequences of heads and tails. To compute the probability of any particular sequence given 40 fair tosses, you multiply the probability of each toss (.5) 40 times.

Any sequence you actually get from a n fair tosses has the same probability every other sequence you could possibly get has.


I never said it wasn't, I never said people were wrong for thinking this, and in the post you first responded to, I never even said anything about a mix or what people expect.

I don't get why you are still on the fact that for any n tosses you expect a mix in general or something that approaches/tends towards .5 H and .5 T. That was never the problem/question posed. I always gave 2 specific sequences.

So I'll ask again: given a series of n coin tosses, where n is any positive integer, how do you compute the probability of the sequence of heads and tails you actually get from those n tosses?

outhouse

LOL now thats just mean right there!!!! :devil1:

mountainman

How do you know (in advance) that you are dealing with a fair coin?

I certainly would not regard the "Early Christian literature" as a fair coin. It's possibly quite corrupt. It has a H and a T. The head is the canonical head of the canonical Jesus, while the tail is the noncanonical imprint of the gnostic heretics. The Vatican and all Believing Apologists can flip this coin all day for centuries, but the result is always heads.

DCHindley

Now if I only got his city right :constern01: He's prolly at MIT where his knowledge of classics would be most useful, but he could be at Yale or Harvard.

DCH

maryhelena

From the blog of Joseph Hoffmann: