Wolfire Games Forums

I've got no bad blood with anyone in here.

BunnyWithStick wrote:

Renegade_Turner wrote:

BunnyWithStick wrote: (It's because it's the most common number people think of when they think of a random number. It's used in friggin' magic tricks, and it works!)

My ass it works. And I'm a US Military spy keeping tabs on this forum..

How can you say that, having watched the program with that magic trick on it?

Or, did you just blindly disagree with me, not having seen it?

Because it's just bullshit to think that people asked to pick a random number will most likely pick 47. It's pure bullshit. Most sensible people would realise that.

Renegade_Turner wrote:Because it's just bullshit to think that people asked to pick a random number will most likely pick 47. It's pure bullshit. Most sensible people would realise that.

Why?

How can they determine it? They'd have to have a survey which is taken by every person in the world. Otherwise any findings that they have are irrelevant as far as I'm concerned. Maybe in 10 people, 10 out of 10 will pick 47 when asked to pick a number between 1-100...but does that mean that all people are then 100% likely to pick 47? No.

i have nothing agianst anyone in the forum, you are cool n have a good sense of humour, i think the reason he has not posted somthing on this topic is because alot of people are agianst him for some retarded reason,or of corse hes just not been on...
and i like coli beecause he is sexualy atracted to chainsaws.....

Renegade_Turner wrote:How can they determine it? They'd have to have a survey which is taken by every person in the world. Otherwise any findings that they have are irrelevant as far as I'm concerned. Maybe in 10 people, 10 out of 10 will pick 47 when asked to pick a number between 1-100...but does that mean that all people are then 100% likely to pick 47? No.

I don't think anyones claiming it will work 100% of the time, but why shouldn't there be numbers which are picked more often?

Spartan X wrote:I LIKE ULTIMATUM...

....

..Okaaaaay....

Well okay, obviously it is most likely that there is a certain number that, when people have been asked to pick a random number, came up most often..but my point was it is impossible to determine that 47 is that number.

Correction, it isn't impossible, large scale surveys can find it out to a rather accurate margin, even ten out of ten people picking 47 out of 1-100 is a very large amount, you know…

So you are saying that any kind of survey is meaningless unless you survey the entire population?

That's not what I'm saying, no, but honestly..because 10 people out of 1000 pick 47 is in no way persuasive evidence that suggests it's a phenomenon of some sort. It's just actually silly.

Almost as silly as superstition. Almost as silly as thinking that if you say "Candyman" three times into a mirror that a man with a hook on his arm will appear and disembowl you..

It is all a question of where you draw the line of statistical significance. Our null hypothesis is that each number is equally likely to be picked. Our experiment shows that 47 is picked ten times in a row. Given our hypothesis, this has a probability of 1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000. I would say that in this case it would be very likely that the original assumption is wrong, and 47 is more likely to be picked than other numbers.

That's still speculation, and I'd say there is still a very high percentage of chance that it's wrong if that were to happen.

NO, YOU'RE WRONG!!!11!1! Seriously, just admit it. Surveys are a valid method of accumulating statistical data.

I'm not going to admit that it's reasonable to believe that there's a number that has some magical thing about it which makes people pick it a lot. I never said surveys were a poor method of data analysis, I'm just saying the idea of the number 47 being a phenomenon is fucking ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous.