You may communicate before the game, but not after it starts. No tricks like moving coins or putting one coin higher than the others. It’s a mathematical solution. How can you guarantee a win? (3/3)

Then the host will point to one of the four coins and tell you that this is the winning coin. You must then turn over exactly one coin and leave the room. Your friend will then go into the room and sit in the same spot. If he can identify the winning coin, you both win. (2/3)

You and your friend are on a game show. The host will take you alone into a room. You will sit at a table and she will place four coins in a line from left to right in front of you. It will be random whether they are heads or tails. (1/3)

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I saw a reel about a woman whose goal for 2025 was to get rejected 1000 times. She "failed" to get rejected 7% of the time, so by the end of the year, she had a new citizenship, a role in a commercial, a pageant win, and more. I'm aiming for more rejections this year.

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From Chapter 1 of Critikid's A Statistical Odyssey.

Can you solve the cookies puzzle?

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5/ To help clear up the confusion, I put together a FREE worksheet for middle-school and up. Some adults may find it informative, too. Get it here:

4/ In short, facts describe what happens, and theories tell us why. Theories never become facts; they explain facts.

3/ A theory is a well-tested explanation for why something happens. For example, Einstein’s theory of general relativity explains gravity as the bending of space and time.

2/ A fact is an observation that has been confirmed over and over. For example, it is a fact that if you let go of a pencil near Earth’s surface, it falls to the ground.

1/ In social media conversations about science, I often see comments like, "It's just a theory. I'll take it seriously if it becomes a fact." This demonstrates a misunderstanding of what these words mean in science.

Informal fallacies are context-dependent. This means same phrase can be a fallacy in one case and reasonable in another. If we teach fallacies without that nuance, people might start mislabelling all "fallacy-shaped" phrases as fallacies.

Answer:

I’ve posted this puzzle on Instagram a few times. In the comments, about 70-80% of people get it wrong, but for two different reasons (split about 50-50). About half of those who get it right get it right for the wrong reason. Only a small percent of people figure it out.

It is becoming more common for people to call out logical fallacies by name. Some logical fallacies, however, are prevalent and yet rarely discussed. Read about 3 of them in my latest article for @PsychToday: https://t.co/Ese2JvHbVg