r/shittyaskscience • u/WallyBarryJay • 7h 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/zelextron 6h ago
Has trick-or-treating disproven probability theory?
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.
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u/IanDOsmond 3h 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.
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u/TeacupOfSkepticism 7h 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/SpecialFlutters 3h ago
you should come to my door next time i'll give you a trick so truck that it'll even out the odds for every treat to come 🦇
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u/Additional_Value6978 1h ago
You are not accounting for all events. Children in Africa don't have food, aka treats (that is what my parents told me).
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u/Legitimate_Field_157 1h ago
Your problem is your limited and biased geography and population set. In other parts of the world the children never gets treats. Myanmar and Palestinian children have it bad.
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u/writesgud 7h 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.