Randomness is Random - Numberphile
Video Statistics and Information
Channel: Numberphile
Views: 512,458
Rating: 4.9424958 out of 5
Keywords: numberphile, randomness, coin, coin flip, coin toss, gamblers fallacy
Id: tP-Ipsat90c
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 13min 31sec (811 seconds)
Published: Tue Dec 18 2018
Please note that this website is currently a work in progress! Lots of interesting data and statistics to come.
I sometimes see comments about how shuffler is riggered or other misconceptions about how randomness works I thought I would share this video, it's a very insightful video about how wrong most humans (me included) think about randomness.
Randomness is random!
A mistake I keep seeing people make, which is related to confirmation bias is people saying "I never get this flooded in paper!" Those are generally people that play about once a week at FNM.
People have already pointed out that many players don't shuffle enough in paper, but that's not the only problem with this line of thought. Even if you do shuffle properly, you might still fall for this fallacy. The reason? MtGA lets you play way more games than you play in paper! If all your paper magic consists in FNM once a week, that's at most 9 games a week. I play more than that in a day on MtGA! If you try to grind the full 15 wins for daily reward (which I don't necessarily advocate, but I know many do), you probably play more than double that every day! In a month of playing MtGA daily, you have close to as many games as you've played at FNM over the course of the last 2 years!
So yes, you'll get flooded in more games on MtGA than in paper, strictly because you play way more games on MtGA! Statements like "I've had extreme floods 5 times in the last 2 weeks, it only happened to me once in paper in the last year" doesn't mean anything other than you play a lot more Arena than paper.
Of course we suck at recognizing randomness, our brains are basically purpose-built pattern recognition machines.
Sarcasm . If you go on the official forums there is a hundred page thread full of those conspiracy theories
Edit:this was in response to another comment
Thing about randomness is that I have no doubt the shuffler is actually random or close to it - but paper magic shuffling isn't even remotely close to "random". Paper magic mana screw is FAR less prevalent than in MTGArena even when people shuffle fairly within reason
I feel like part of the reason people get mana screwed or flooded is the decks theyβre playing. Iβm a new player, and it took me a while to realize that the automatic land fill in your deck can (and often should) be tweaked. If youβre playing ramp, you can forego a few forests, and conversely, if youβre playing multiple colors, you need to put in double lands.
Randomness is Random