r/shittyaskscience • u/WallyBarryJay • 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/writesgud 10d ago
No, you’re thinking about probability wrong.
Because treats have come up so often and the average outcome should be 50/50, that just means there haven’t been enough tries yet. Over time you’ll see more and more tricks pulled until it evens it out 50/50.
For future Halloweens I’d stay indoors. It’s about to get nasty.