Pattern Addicts

When sitting at a roulette table where the option is red or black, and spinning... a series of reds in a row may make the chancer think, “it has got to be black next”. 

But no. This is called the Gambler’s Fallacy, “more frequent in the past means less frequent in the future (or vice versa)”. 

The roulette table has no memory. It is a pure-play live-in-the-moment fanatic. The chance is the same every time. 

This is not something that is natural to us pattern addicts who thrive on story telling. Even trained statisticians are not intuitive statisticians. You bend your heart and mind to accept the rules of chance. Override what seems to be true, to accept randomness. 

Our lives are short, and they may be too short to gather sufficient evidence. When we have enough evidence, it may no longer be relevant, because the driving forces have changed. Significant data mud wrestles with relevant data. 

You can harness randomness to help you make decisions, if you can admit that going right or left doesn’t fundamentally matter. What matters is going. Sometimes waiting for further evidence is just waiting. 

The trick is to overcome the debilitating fear of randomness.