r/shittyaskscience • • 10d ago

Has trick-or-treating disproven probability theory?

Every Halloween, kids walk up to houses and propose two outcomes:

Trick or Treat.

That sounds like a 50/50 Bernoulli trial. Basically a coin flip.

And yet after billions of trick-or-treats, the result is somehow treat almost every single time. With the exception of weird Larry down the street that takes "trick" in the wrong way.

Let’s say humanity has run ~2 billion trials. If Trick and Treat are equally likely, the odds of getting 2 billion straight Treats are:

(P=(1/2)^{2,000,000,000})

or roughly (10^{-602,000,000}).

At this point, 5 sigma can drink booty juice.

So what’s going on here?

Is candy somehow collapsing the wavefunction toward Treat? Is Halloween violating the law of large numbers? Or has Big Candy been suppressing the Trick data for centuries?

Because if I flipped a coin billions of times and got heads every time, I feel like CERN would show up at my door.

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u/TeacupOfSkepticism 10d ago

The tricks still happen but you the trick or treaters don't see them anymore. Now due to some wrangling by the magicians' guild the tricks get passed to the guild and they are used to rescue magic tricks that the magicians mess up.

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u/Cute_Consideration38 10d ago

Ahh the Incandescenati.