Why We Find Patterns in Randomness
It helps us survive, and we naturally evolved as humans to do so
I see patterns in randomness all the time, even if sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar, not a phallic symbol. For me, everything going wrong in a given warning is a sign of God wanting me to be challenged on a given morning. The run that ran poorly was a sign of God’s plan that running wasn’t for me that day. The fact that I’m not motivated to do my work means God wants me to do something else at a given moment.
The gambler’s paradox is the phenomenon of someone who places bets and looks for patterns to take advantage of. However, those patterns tend not to actually be there, so according to American physicist, Richard A. Muller, “the routine heel really is random — at least at an honest casino.” Each spin of the roulette is inherently random, and in the world of gambling, streaks don’t empirically exist. The gambler’s paradox is also called the Monte Carlo fallacy and the fallacy of the maturity of chances, and is widely cited as to why people gamble as much as they do.
There’s actually a psychological term for the tendency to ascribe patterns to randomness — apophenia. Psychiatrist Klaus Conrad defines apophenia as the “unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness.” Within…
