Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by OscarCunningham 2551 days ago
I would guess that in China the probabilities of 4 and 8 goes down. Asking people to pick randomly drives them away from special numbers.
1 comments

In the US 7 is a lucky # and a statistical outlier in that it was more frequently chosen in the article above.
You might be right, but my guess is that 7's reputation for luck isn't famous enough to make a difference, and in fact it's common because other numbers seem too "unrandom".

We could test by asking people to pick numbers less than 100. I bet people would focus on odd numbers, especially those greater than 50, not ending in 5 or not having both digits the same.

I decided to do that.

Data and light analysis is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Dh0wiTCRkBhckWGXtjZg...

I definitely overpaid on Mechanical Turk per response, given how lightning quickly the data came in. (I decided to pay $0.10/HIT for 50 responses and got 68 responses in 8m26s.) I suspect that offering a nickel would have gotten the survey filled in under half an hour still...

Maybe 7 cents?