> A string of HHHHHH is exactly as likely as HTHTHT, but people don't intuit that.

this contradicts the comment you're replying to. the premise they are having is that HTHTHT is "less random" than HHHHHH.

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dwattttt 16 hours ago | parent [-]

The strings are equally likely if they're being purely randomly selected, but not if they're being selected by people with a poor understanding of random. In the latter case, people are more likely to select HTHTHT.

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ShinyLeftPad 9 hours ago | parent [-]

I wonder what thought process led you to believe that even though the strings are equally likely and random, people who don't choose the one you think is more random have somehow inferior understanding of randomness

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svnt 7 hours ago | parent [-]

The issue the anecdote is reflecting is that across the data of 50 naive made-up coin tosses there are too many alternating sequences and probably zero HHHHHH.

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ShinyLeftPad 6 hours ago | parent [-]

and it's different from 50 randomly selected true coin tosses because you think it's impossible for all of them to alternate?

	▲	svnt 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I understand your point, but the context is that repeatedly, experiments have shown that humans inject too much pattern to be good rngs. It turns out that is visible with training after the fact. Yes, it is possible that any two 50-sequence patterns are actual rng. But some of them are much more likely, and we can tell.