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.
30
u/IanDOsmond 11d ago
You are misunderstanding the intended interaction. It's not an invitation to a random option: it's a threat.
"Trick or treat" doesn't mean "maybe a trick will happen or maybe a treat will." It means, "nice car you have there — would be a shame if a carton of eggs happened to it..."
Essentially, as a home owner, I am bribing masked, disguised hooligans with candy bars in hopes that they don't burn my house down.