I know, 50/50 heads tails right? But help me understand the next step – each coin flip has a 50/50 shot of heads or tails. What I don’t understand is how the likelihood of the next flip doesn’t change. For example if I flipped a coin 10 times and every time it flipped heads, the next flip would be 50/50 tails. Wouldn’t the likelihood of flipping a coin 11 times and having it be heads every time be really low? 0.5^11 = 0.048%?
Here’s the origin of the question. I was at a roulette table and the guy said “it’s been black the last 8 rolls, the next one has to be red.” At first I thought, the next roll will be ~47% black, ~47 red, ~6% 0 or 00 you fucking imbecile. Then I thought to myself, what are the chances that there are no red rolls in 9 rolls, which is well below 1%.
Am I the imbecile?
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Events that have already occurred don’t have a probability. They already did or didn’t happen. It’s like saying what are the chances a guy named dragonbank would be born in his current state, move to all the places he moved to, work all the jobs he worked, study for a PhD in economics, and make a reddit account. Well you can assume the odds of each of those events are super rare. But we know they already have happened so simply adding on “and then answer my eli5 question” doesn’t somehow make the odds of the whole thing rarer. The rest has already occurred. Now the issue is figuring the probability of me answering your eli5 question.
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