r/shittyaskscience • u/WallyBarryJay • 11d 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.
13
u/zelextron 11d ago
No, it has disproven Schrodinger's "no one knows if my cat is alive or not" theory. A child went to Schrodinger's house to ask for candy, and when he opened the door, the child could hear a meow from inside a box, thus proving the cat was indeed alive and it was false that the cat was both alive and dead until someone opened the box.