It’s fascinating how that works, isn’t it? Runs make the human mind uncomfortable. In our heads, probabilities should be normally distributed, that is, play out as described. If a coin is tossed ten times, about five of those should be heads. Of course, that’s not how probability actually works—and even though a hundred heads in a row should rightly make us wonder if we’re playing with a fair coin or stuck in a Stoppardian alternate reality, a run of ten or twenty may well happen. Our discomfort stems from the law of small numbers: we think small samples should mirror large ones, but they
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