PT106 · S1 · Q3 For any given ticket in a 1000-ticket

If one horse has a 99.9% chance of winning, then it's absolutely reasonable to believe that no one other than that horse will win. It's another thing to say that no one other than that horse can win. But that's a different flaw. That's just pointing out a technicality of language. We'd be saying, "Even though it's virtually certain that Horse X will win, it's not 100% certain, so you can't say that other horses can't win." The fact that something is EXTREMELY unlikely doesn't make it impossible. This answer is saying that "only one thing can be the winner" whereas the original conclusion was saying "zero things can be the winner". And in this argument, one horse has a huge advantage over all the other horses in the race. In the original, no lottery ticket had any advantage over all the other tickets in the lottery. This answer is trying to make people enticed for shallow, superficial reasons. It regurgitates the number 1000.

There's nothing really flawed with this argument. If it's "unreasonable to believe that Pam is at the soccer game", then it's "reasonable to believe that Pam is not at the soccer game". That's just a legal inversion of "Unreasonable that X is true = reasonable that X is false". If you interpret the premise to be saying "it's unreasonable to believe that 1000 consecutive coin flips will ever turn up heads", then it's fine to conclude "it's reasonable to think 1000 flips will never all be heads". It's not impossible, because the probability of it happening (1/2 to the 1000th power) is nonzero. But that probability is so infinitesimally small, that you'd have to be flipping coins for WAY longer than the lifespan of this universe to ever see it come true. So it's reasonable to believe it'll never come true. Saying "it's reasonable to believe X will never happen" is not the same as saying "X is impossible". This answer is trying to make people enticed by the superficial similarity of the number 1000.

This argument has an internally flawed premise, which the original didn't. It is not reasonable to believe that if the most recent flip was tails that the next flip will be heads. That is flawed logic we refer to as Gambler's Fallacy. The conclusion is also internally wacky. If the last 1000 flips were tails, then you've got yourself a trick coin / a weighted coin / a coin with tails on both sides. You have no reason to think the next flip would be heads. This answer is trying to make people enticed by the superficial similarity of the number 1000.

This is interpreting the concept of average too literally. When we say the average height of 5-year-olds is 1 m, that doesn't mean that any five year old is exactly 1m tall. It might be that the average salary at your company is $67,000 a year, even though no one makes that actual amount.