God Awful Things

This post is dedicated to Strongo who just again marveled me with his amazing math skills.

Strongo suffers from Gamblers fallacy.

Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman proposed that the gambler’s fallacy is a cognitive bias produced by a psychological heuristic called therepresentativeness heuristic ^[3][4]. According to this view, “after observing a long run of red on the roulette wheel, for example, most people erroneously believe that black will result in a more representative sequence than the occurrence of an additional red,”^[5] so people expect that a short run of random outcomes should share properties of a longer run, specifically in that deviations from average should balance out. When people are asked to make up a random-looking sequence of coin tosses, they tend to make sequences where the proportion of heads to tails stays close to 0.5 in any short segment more so than would be predicted by chance ^[6]; Kahneman and Tversky interpret this to mean that people believe short sequences of random events should be representative of longer ones ^[7].

The representativeness heuristic is also cited behind the related phenomenon of the clustering illusion, according to which people see streaks of random events as being non-random when such streaks are actually much more likely to occur in small samples than people expect ^[8].