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People are born with bad intuitions about how randomness works -- it's not learned. For whatever reason, our brains are wired to make uniformity feel random and
by a-priori 13y ago
People are born with bad intuitions about how randomness works -- it's not learned. For whatever reason, our brains are wired to make uniformity feel random and randomness feel ordered.
It's why we see stars in the sky, which are more or less distributed randomly in the star field, yet they don't appear random: they appear to form constellations.
It's basically impossible to correct this bad intuition. People educated in the statistics and mathematics of random numbers have to consciously learn what real randomness looks like and override their intuition.
But try as you might, the night sky will still form constellations. And dice rolls will still, frustratingly and confusingly, fall into streaks more often than you'd expect.
- dllthomas 13y agoThere are a lot of systems in the brain. It's theoretically possible that one of them will be untrainably spitting out the same flawed predictions, but we can certainly learn how to respond appropriately to those sensations.