"Frank" <frank@...> wrote:
> I would like to start a contest for the best analogy
> to explain why it's a bad idea to look for patterns
> in random events.
Example: you have stomach aches. The first week, you get them on Tuesday morning and Thursday evening. The following week, you get one Sunday afternoon. These aches are happening randomly; "random" after all means that you *don't know* what causes it.
So you look for patterns in these random events. Due to this effort, you discover that the aches come precisely at those times when you'd eaten a pickle a few hours earlier. So looking for a pattern in those random events saves you from suffering.
In this way, pretty much all personal improvement, all human advancement, comes from looking for patterns in random events. Everyone naturally looks for patterns in random events... those who fail to look for patterns get kicked out of the gene pool damn quickly.
When we play e.g. video poker, why don't we look for such patterns? For one specific reason: We know that there have been many, many controlled studies in which people have tried to find patterns in what those computer chips generate, and no one has ever demonstrated such an ability. Since so main other individuals have failed to find a predictive pattern, we conclude that we'd fail also.
In other words: why do we conclude it's pointless to try to predict a hand of video poker? Firstly, because we've read about those studies in which psychics etc failed to make such predictions accurately. And secondly, because we believe that life can be understood through recognizing patterns. Patterns such as: if 1000 people fail to predict the cards generated on a VP machine, we conclude that it's highly likely that the 1001st person will fail also.
Stuart
http://stuart-randomthoughts.blogspot.com/
