Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Ill_ban_myself 2551 days ago
In the US 7 is a lucky # and a statistical outlier in that it was more frequently chosen in the article above.
1 comments

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?