Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Perception, informed not just by the facts but our instinctive interpretations of how those facts feel, IS reality…a potentially dangerous reality

 The problem is that we humans didn’t evolve to live in the world in which we find ourselves.  As the social scientists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby put it, the human mind was “designed to solve the day-to-day problems of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. These stone age priorities produced a brain far better at solving some problems than others.” 

there are four failings common to human beings as a result of our Stone-Age brain that hinder us in politics.

why are we this way?  Science suggests that one reason is that we evolved to win in social settings and in such situations the truth doesn't matter as much as sheer doggedness

Second, we find it hard to size up politicians correctly.  The reason for this is that we rely on instant impressions. 

This stops voters from worrying that they need to bolster their impressions by consulting experts and reading news stories from a broad array of ideological viewpoints.  Why study when you can rely on your gut instinct?

Third, we aren’t inclined to reward politicians who tell us hard truths.

First, most people find it easy to ignore politics because it usually involves people they don’t know.  As human beings we evolved to care about people in our immediate vicinity.  Our nervous system kicks into action usually only when we meet people face-to-face

 This has left millions of voters on their own.  Lacking information, millions do what you would expect.  They go with their gut

We don't want the truth to prevail, as Harvard's Steven Pinker informs us, we want our version of the truth to prevail, for in the end what we're really concerned with is maintaining our status or enhancing it.

Fourth, we frequently fail to show empathy in circumstances that clearly cry out for it.

We evolved to show empathy for people we know.  It takes special effort to empathize with people who don’t dress like us or look like us.

long-term we need to teach voters not to trust their instincts in politics because our instincts often don’t work.

Doing politics in a modern mass democracy, in other words, is an unnatural act.

Teaching this lesson doesn’t sound like a job for historians, but in one way it is.  Studying history is all about putting events into context. And as it turns out, voters need to learn the importance of context.

Given the mismatch between our Stone-Age brain and the problems we face in the 21st century, we should only trust our political instincts when those instincts are serviceable in a modern context.  If they aren’t (and most of the time they aren't), then higher order cognitive thinking is required.

Just why mass ignorance seems to be afflicting our politics at this moment is a complicated question.  But here again history can be helpful.  The answer seems to be that the institutions voters formerly could turn to for help have withered.

most of the time we return to a state of well-being by simply ignoring the evidence we find discomforting.  This is known as Disconfirmation Bias and it afflicts all of us

ut cultural norms can be established that help us overcome our natural inclinations.

don’t have much confidence that people in general will be willing on their own to undertake the effort.

In doing so, Nietzsche disassociates love from its other-worldly Christian-Platonic heritage, and so asserts his ethical claims concerning the value of the Earth over the other-worldly, and the truth of the body over the sacred.

Nietzsche speaks critically about the possessive or tyrannical qualities of masculine love alongside its fictionalising tendencies, stating that the natural functions of a woman’s body disgust men because they prevent him having complete access to her as a possession; they also encroach upon the conceptual perfection of love. He writes, “‘The human being under the skin’ is for all lovers a horror and unthinkable, a blasphemy against God and love.”

He proposes that love is close to greed and the lust for possession. Love is an instinctual force related to our biological and cultural drives, and as such, cannot be considered a moral good (GS 363).

Nietzsche pointedly distinguishes masculine from feminine love by the notions of devotion and fidelity. Whereas women want to surrender completely to love, to approach it as a faith, “to be taken and accepted as a possession” (363), Nietzsche claims male love hinges upon the possessive thirst to acquire more from the lover, and states that men who are inclined towards complete devotion are “not men.”

In other words, the experiences of both greed and love are the same drive or instinct, but depending upon the level of satisfaction one has achieved, this drive will be alternatively named ‘greed’ or ‘love’: satisfied people who feel their possessions (their lover for example) threatened by others will name other’s instinct for gain greed or avarice, whereas those who are still searching out something new to desire will impose a positive evaluation on that instinct and call it ‘love’.

In order to be successful in love, he counsels women to “simulate a lack of love” and to enact the roles that men find attractive. Nietzsche finds love comedic because it does not consist in some attempt to know the other deeply, but rather in the confirmation of male fantasies in which women perform their constructed gender roles.

Nietzsche’s writings on love have not surprisingly been influential on many feminist reflections on sex/gender. Although he is not making moralising claims about how one should love, his discussion of the difficult impact erotic and romantic relationships have on women, as well as his commentary on the ironies both sexes face in love, force his readers of both sexes to examine the roles that they play in love. It is difficult when reading him not to question one’s own performances in romantic relationships.

The starting point for appreciating that there is a distinctive part of our psychology for morality is seeing how moral judgments differ from other kinds of opinions we have on how people ought to behave.

Moralization is a psychological state that can be turned on and off like a switch, and when it is on, a distinctive mind-set commandeers our thinking. This is the mind-set that makes us deem actions immoral (“killing is wrong”), rather than merely disagreeable (“I hate brussels sprouts”), unfashionable (“bell-bottoms are out”) or imprudent (“don’t scratch mosquito bites”).

The first hallmark of moralization is that the rules it invokes are felt to be universal

Many of these moralizations, like the assault on smoking, may be understood as practical tactics to reduce some recently identified harm. But whether an activity flips our mental switches to the “moral” setting isn’t just a matter of how much harm it does

We all know what it feels like when the moralization switch flips inside us — the righteous glow, the burning dudgeon, the drive to recruit others to the cause.

The human moral sense turns out to be an organ of considerable complexity, with quirks that reflect its evolutionary history and its neurobiological foundations.

At the same time, many behaviors have been amoralized, switched from moral failings to lifestyle choices. They include divorce, illegitimacy, being a working mother, marijuana use and homosexuality.

This wave of amoralization has led the cultural right to lament that morality itself is under assault, as we see in the group that anointed itself the Moral Majority. In fact there seems to be a Law of Conservation of Moralization, so that as old behaviors are taken out of the moralized column, new ones are added to it.

Much of our recent social history, including the culture wars between liberals and conservatives, consists of the moralization or amoralization of particular kinds of behavior.

People don’t generally engage in moral reasoning, Haidt argues, but moral rationalization: they begin with the conclusion, coughed up by an unconscious emotion, and then work backward to a plausible justification.

When psychologists say “most people” they usually mean “most of the two dozen sophomores who filled out a questionnaire for beer money.” But in this case it means most of the 200,000 people from a hundred countries who shared their intuitions on a Web-based experiment conducted by the psychologists Fiery Cushman and Liane Young and the biologist Marc Hauser. A difference between the acceptability of switch-pulling and man-heaving, and an inability to justify the choice, was found in respondents from Europe, Asia and North and South America; among men and women, blacks and whites, teenagers and octogenarians, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, Jews and atheists; people with elementary-school educations and people with Ph.D.’s.

Joshua Greene, a philosopher and cognitive neuroscientist, suggests that evolution equipped people with a revulsion to manhandling an innocent person. This instinct, he suggests, tends to overwhelm any utilitarian calculus that would tot up the lives saved and lost

the findings corroborate Greene’s theory that our nonutilitarian intuitions come from the victory of an emotional impulse over a cost-benefit analysis.

There are more than a dozen of these risk perception factors, (see Ch. 3 of “How Risky Is It, Really? Why Our Fears Don’t Match the Facts", available online free at)

Because our perceptions rely as much as or more on feelings than simply on the facts, we sometimes get risk wrong. We’re more afraid of some risks than we need to be (child abduction, vaccines), and not as afraid of some as we ought to be (climate change, particulate air pollution), and that “Perception Gap” can be a risk in and of itself

We must understand that instinct and intellect are interwoven components of a single system that helps us perceive the world and make our judgments and choices, a system that worked fine when the risks we faced were simpler but which can make dangerous mistakes as we try to figure out some of the more complex dangers posed in our modern world.

What we can do to avoid the dangers that arise when our fears don’t match the facts—the most rational thing to do—is, first, to recognize that our risk perceptions can never be purely objectively perfectly 'rational', and that our subjective perceptions are prone to potentially dangerous mistakes.

Then we can begin to apply all the details we've discovered of how our risk perception system works, and use that knowledge and self-awareness to make wiser, more informed, healthier choices

here is a truth with which I hope we can all agree. Our subjective system of cognition can be dangerous. It can produce perceptions that conflict with the evidence, what I call The Perception Gap, which can in turn produce profound harm.

The Perception Gap can lead to disagreements that create destructive and violent social conflict, to dangerous personal choices that feel safe but aren’t, and to policies more consistent with how we feel than what is in fact in our best interest. The Perception Gap may in fact be potentially more dangerous than any individual risk we face.

We need to recognize the greater threat that our subjective system of cognition can pose, and in the name of our own safety and the welfare of the society on which we depend, do our very best to rise above it or, when we can’t, account for this very real danger in the policies we adopt.

we have an obligation to confront our own ideological priors. We have an obligation to challenge ourselves, to push ourselves, to be suspicious of conclusions that are too convenient, to be sure that we're getting it right.

subjective cognition is built-in, subconscious, beyond free will, and unavoidably leads to different interpretations of the same facts.

Views that have more to do with competing tribal biases than objective interpretations of the evidence create destructive and violent conflict.

And Mr. Peterson simply ignores several decades worth of recent studies in cognitive science by researchers such as David Povinelli, Bruce Hood, Michael Tomasello and Elisabetta Visalberghi, which have elucidated very real differences between human and nonhuman minds in the realm of conceptual reasoning, particularly with respect to what has been termed "theory of mind." This is the uniquely human ability to have thoughts about thoughts and to perceive that other minds exist and that they can hold ideas and beliefs different from one's own. While human and animal minds share a broadly similar ability to learn from experience, formulate intentions and store memories, careful experiments have repeatedly come up empty when attempting to establish the existence of a theory of mind in nonhumans.

This not only detracts from the argument Mr. Peterson seeks to make but reinforces the sense of intellectual parochialism that is the book's chief flaw. Modern evolutionary psychology and cognitive science have done much to illuminate the evolutionary instincts that animate complex human mental processes. Unfortunately, in his determination to level the playing field between human and nonhuman minds, Mr. Peterson has ignored at least half his story.

But it is an explanation

it is naïve to expect that we ever really can overcome the most basic instinct of all, the instinct to keep ourselves alive. Rational decision making may seem intelligent. Moral decision making may seem honorable. The survival imperative trumps them both.

This matters for social animals like us, whose safety and very survival ultimately depend on our ability to coexist. Views that have more to do with competing tribal biases than objective interpretations of the evidence create destructive and violent conflict. Denial of scientifically established ‘truth’ cause all sorts of serious direct harms. Consider a few examples; • The widespread faith-based rejection of evolution feeds intense polarization. • Continued fear of vaccines is allowing nearly eradicated diseases to return. • Those who deny the evidence of the safety of genetically modified food are also denying the immense potential benefits of that technology to millions. • Denying the powerful evidence for climate change puts us all in serious jeopardy should that evidence prove to be true.

To address these harms, we need to understand why we often have trouble agreeing on what is true (what some have labeled science denialism). Social science has taught us that human cognition is innately, and inescapably, a process of interpreting the hard data about our world – its sights and sound and smells and facts and ideas - through subjective affective filters that help us turn those facts into the judgments and choices and behaviors that help us survive. The brain’s imperative, after all, is not to reason. It’s job is survival, and subjective cognitive biases and instincts have developed to help us make sense of information in the pursuit of safety, not so that we might come to know ‘THE universal absolute truth

This subjective cognition is built-in, subconscious, beyond free will, and unavoidably leads to different interpretations of the same facts.

But here is a truth with which I hope we can all agree. Our subjective system of cognition can be dangerous.

It can produce perceptions that conflict with the evidence, what I call The Perception Gap, which can in turn produce profound harm

We need to recognize the greater threat that our subjective system of cognition can pose, and in the name of our own safety and the welfare of the society on which we depend, do our very best to rise above it or, when we can’t, account for this very real danger in the policies we adopt.

"Everyone engages in motivated reasoning, everyone screens out unwelcome evidence, no one is a fully rational actor. Sure. But when it comes to something with such enormous consequences to human welfare

I think it's fair to say we have an obligation to confront our own ideological priors. We have an obligation to challenge ourselves, to push ourselves, to be suspicious of conclusions that are too convenient, to be sure that we're getting it right.

It’s what they use to track prey and avoid predation.

The theory of mind is so obvious it’s nearly invisible: it tells us that behavior is the result of the joint operation of pairs of beliefs and desires.

The desires are about the ways we want things to turn out in the future. The beliefs are about the way things are now.

The theory of mind turns what people do into a story with a plot by pairing up the content of beliefs and desires, what they are about.

Psycholinguistics has shown that the theory of mind is necessary for learning language and almost anything else our parents teach us.

Imitating others requires using the theory to figure out what they want us to do and in what order. Without it, you can’t learn much beyond what other higher primates can.

The theory of mind makes us construct stories obsessively, and thus encourages us to see the past as a set of them.

When popular historians seek to know why Hitler declared war on the U.S. (when he didn’t have to), they put the theory of mind to work: What did he believe and what was it that he wanted that made him do such a foolish thing?

he trouble is that the theory of mind is completely wrong about the way the mind, i.e. the brain, actually works. We can’t help but use it to guess what is going on in other people’s minds, and historians rely on it, but the evidence from neuroscience shows that in fact what’s “going on” in anyone’s mind is not decision about what to do in the light of beliefs and desire, but rather a series of neural circuitry firings.

The wrongness of the theory of mind is so profound it makes false all the stories we know and love, in narrative history (and in historical novels).

Neuroscience reveals that the brain is not organized even remotely to work the way the theory of mind says it does. The fact that narrative histories give persistently different answers to questions historians have been asking for centuries should be evidence that storytelling is not where the real answers can be found.

Crucially, they discovered that while different parts of the brain control different things, the neurons’ electrical signals don’t differ in “content”; they are not about different subjects. They are not about anything at all. Each neuron is just in a different part of the mid-brain, doing its job in exactly the same way all other neurons do, sending the same electrochemical oscillations.

There is nothing in our brains to vindicate the theory’s description of how anyone ever makes up his or her mind. And that explains a lot about how bad the theory of mind is at predicting anything much about the future, or explaining anything much about the past.

If we really want historical knowledge we’ll need to use the same tools scientists use — models and theories we can quantify and test. Guessing what was going through Hitler’s mind, and weaving it into a story is no substitute for empirical science.

confirm the central role of the damaged region — the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is thought to generate social emotions, like compassion.

The new study seals the case by demonstrating that a very specific kind of emotion-based judgment is altered when the region is offline.

people with the injury will even endorse suffocating an infant if that would save more lives.

at least two systems working when we make moral judgments,

There’s an emotional system that depends on this specific part of the brain

system that performs more utilitarian cost-benefit analyses

Jurors have reduced sentences based on brain-imaging results, and experts say that any evidence of damage to this ventromedial area could sway judgments of moral competency in some cases.

The new study focused on six patients who had suffered very specific damage to the ventromedial area from an aneurysm or a tumor

can be lucid, easygoing, talkative and intelligent, but blind to subtle social cues, making them socially awkward.

They strongly favored flipping the switch, just as group of people without injuries did.

the ventromedial cortex

All three groups also strongly rejected doing harm to others in situations that were not a matter of trading one certain death for another.

some of the same moral instincts

a large difference in the participants’ decisions emerged when there was no switch to flip

taking direct action to kill or harm someone (pushing him in front of the runaway boxcar, for example) and serving a greater good.

were about twice as likely as the other participants to say they would push someone in front of the train (if that was the only option)

The ventromedial area is a primitive part of the cortex that appears to have evolved to help humans and other mammals navigate social interactions

The area has connections to deeper, unconscious regions like the brain stem,

The ventromedial area integrates these signals with others from the cortex, including emotional memories, to help generate familiar social reactions.

This tension between cost-benefit calculations and instinctive emotion in part reflects the brain’s continuing adjustment to the vast social changes that have occurred since the ventromedial area first took shape

transforms the way people make moral judgments in life-or-death situations, scientists are reporting today.

this rare injury expressed increased willingness to kill or harm another person if doing so would save others' lives.

“Good” artists instinctively exclude elements of what they know to be part of real life if they feel it may be “bad,” artistically speaking. The prudish Victorians regarded sexual language in fiction that way. Charles Dickens, obviously, knew that people have sex, but he would never spell such a thing out in a novel, even though he knew dirty language was part of real life (especially among the lowlifes he sometimes wrote about, like Fagin and company). It was “bad.” It may have been “bad” in a different sense—as in indecent, improper—but it was “bad” artistically as well, in that his sense of his audience kept him from being too graphic or explicit, either in scenes or dialogue. Meanwhile, Dickens was at liberty to engineer a scene in which, say, a tuberculosis-stricken orphan switches places at the guillotine with a virginal seamstress. Today, you can put all sorts of explicit sexual references in fiction, and the average critic won’t chide you for immorality or indecency; sentimentality will get you panned every time.

The critical temperament of an age shapes an age’s creativity not just in the supply-demand way, motivating writers to produce what is praised and valued by critics and readers. The critical temperament actually blocks off areas of life to create a portrayal of the world that fits its idea of the world. So a prudish era like the Victorian will target immorality—and a cynical or ironic era like ours will target sentimentality.

there’s that exquisite verse, one of the most beautiful in the Bible, the one that says if God cares deeply about sparrows, don’t you think He cares about you? One is so accustomed to dwelling on the second, human, half of the equation, the comforting part, but when you put your hand over that and consider only the first, it’s a little startling: God cares deeply about the sparrows. Not just that, He cares about them individually. “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies?” Jesus says. “Yet not one of them is forgotten in God’s sight.”

The modern conversation on animal consciousness proceeds, with the rest of the Enlightenment, from the mind of René Descartes, whose take on animals was vividly (and approvingly) paraphrased by the French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche: they “eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it; they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing.” Descartes’ term for them was automata

In On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin made the intriguing claim that among the naturalists he knew it was consistently the case that the better a researcher got to know a certain species, the more each individual animal’s actions appeared attributable to “reason and the less to unlearnt instinct.” The more you knew, the more you suspected that they were rational. That marks an important pivot, that thought, insofar as it took place in the mind of someone devoted to extremely close and meticulous study of living animals, a mind that had trained itself not to sentimentalize.

The sheer number and variety of experiments carried out in the twentieth century—and with, if anything, a renewed intensity in the twenty-first—exceeds summary. Reasoning, language, neurology, the science of emotions—every chamber where “consciousness” is thought to hide has been probed. Birds and chimps and dolphins have been made to look at themselves in mirrors—to observe whether, on the basis of what they see, they groom or preen (a measure, if somewhat arbitrary, of self-awareness). Dolphins have been found to grieve. Primates have learned symbolic or sign languages and then been interrogated with them. Their answers show thinking but have proved stubbornly open to interpretation on the issue of “consciousness,” with critics warning, as always, about the dangers of anthropomorphism, animal-rights bias, etc.

If we put aside the self-awareness standard—and really, how arbitrary and arrogant is that, to take the attribute of consciousness we happen to possess over all creatures and set it atop the hierarchy, proclaiming it the very definition of consciousness (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg wrote something wise in his notebooks, to the effect of: only a man can draw a self-portrait, but only a man wants to)—it becomes possible to say at least the following: the overwhelming tendency of all this scientific work, of its results, has been toward more consciousness. More species having it, and species having more of it than assumed.

The animal kingdom is symphonic with mental activity, and of its millions of wavelengths, we’re born able to understand the minutest sliver. The least we can do is have a proper respect for our ignorance.

The philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote an essay in 1974 titled, “What Is It Like To Be a Bat?”, in which he put forward perhaps the least overweening, most useful definition of “animal consciousness” ever written, one that channels Spinoza’s phrase about “that nature belonging to him wherein he has his being.” Animal consciousness occurs, Nagel wrote, when “there is something that it is to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.” The strangeness of his syntax carries the genuine texture of the problem. We’ll probably never be able to step far enough outside of our species-reality to say much about what is going on with them, beyond saying how like or unlike us they are. Many things are conscious on the earth, and we are one, and our consciousness feels like this; one of the things it causes us to do is doubt the existence of the consciousness of the other millions of species. But it also allows us to imagine a time when we might stop doing that.

In this past weekend’s Styles section of the New York Times, Siegel uses “The Lonely Crowd” to analyze the putative “Yelpification” of contemporary life: according to Siegel, Riesman’s view was that “people went from being ‘inner-directed’ to ‘outer-directed,’ from heeding their own instincts and judgment to depending on the judgments and opinions of tastemakers and trendsetters.” The “conformist power of the crowd” and its delighted ability to write online reviews led Siegel down a sad path to a lackluster expensive dinner.

What Riesman actually suggested was that we think of social organization in terms of a series of “ideal types” along a spectrum of increasingly loose authority

On one end of the spectrum is a “tradition-directed” community, where we all understand that what we’re supposed to do is what we’re supposed to do because it’s just the thing that one does; authority is unequivocal, and there’s neither the room nor the desire for autonomous action

In the middle of the spectrum, as one moves toward a freer distribution of, and response to, authority, is “inner-direction.” The inner-directed character is concerned not with “what one does” but with “what people like us do.” Which is to say that she looks to her own internalizations of past authorities to get a sense for how to conduct her affairs.

Contemporary society, Riesman thought, was best understood as chiefly “other-directed,” where the inculcated authority of the vertical (one’s lineage) gives way to the muddled authority of the horizontal (one’s peers).

The inner-directed person orients herself by an internal “gyroscope,” while the other-directed person orients herself by “radar.”

It’s not that the inner-directed person consults some deep, subjective, romantically sui generis oracle. It’s that the inner-directed person consults the internalized voices of a mostly dead lineage, while her other-directed counterpart heeds the external voices of her living contemporaries.

“the gyroscopic mechanism allows the inner-directed person to appear far more independent than he really is: he is no less a conformist to others than the other-directed person, but the voices to which he listens are more distant, of an older generation, their cues internalized in his childhood.” The inner-directed person is, simply, “somewhat less concerned than the other-directed person with continuously obtaining from contemporaries (or their stand-ins: the mass media) a flow of guidance, expectation, and approbation.

Riesman drew no moral from the transition from a community of primarily inner-directed people to a community of the other-directed. Instead, he saw that each ideal type had different advantages and faced different problems

As Riesman understood it, the primary disciplining emotion under tradition direction is shame, the threat of ostracism and exile that enforces traditional action. Inner-directed people experience not shame but guilt, or the fear that one’s behavior won’t be commensurate with the imago within. And, finally, other-directed folks experience not guilt but a “contagious, highly diffuse” anxiety—the possibility that, now that authority itself is diffuse and ambiguous, we might be doing the wrong thing all the time.

Siegel is right to make the inference, if wayward in his conclusions. It makes sense to associate the anxiety of how to relate to livingly diffuse authorities with the Internet, which presents the greatest signal-to-noise-ratio problem in human history.

The problem with Yelp is not the role it plays, for Siegel, in the proliferation of monoculture; most people of my generation have learned to ignore Yelp entirely. It’s the fact that, after about a year of usefulness, Yelp very quickly became a terrible source of information.

There are several reasons for this. The first is the nature of an algorithmic response to the world. As Jaron Lanier points out in “Who Owns the Future?,” the hubris behind each new algorithm is the idea that its predictive and evaluatory structure is game-proof; but the minute any given algorithm gains real currency, all the smart and devious people devote themselves to gaming it. On Yelp, the obvious case would be garnering positive reviews by any means necessary.

A second problem with Yelp’s algorithmic ranking is in the very idea of using online reviews; as anybody with a book on Amazon knows, they tend to draw more contributions from people who feel very strongly about something, positively or negatively. This undermines the statistical relevance of their recommendations.

the biggest problem with Yelp is not that it’s a popularity contest. It’s not even that it’s an exploitable popularity contest.

it’s the fact that Yelp makes money by selling ads and prime placements to the very businesses it lists under ostensibly neutral third-party review

But Yelp’s valuations are always possibly in bad faith, even if its authority is dressed up as the distilled algorithmic wisdom of a crowd. For Riesman, that’s the worst of all possible worlds: a manipulated consumer certainty that only shores up the authority of an unchosen, hidden source. In that world, cold monkfish is the least of our problems.

A working paper published this summer has caused a stir by proposing that a classic body of research disproving the existence of the hot hand in basketball is flawed by a subtle misperception about randomness. If the analysis is correct, the possibility remains that the hot hand is real.

We mortals can benefit, at least in theory, from islands of predictability — a barely perceptible tilt of a roulette table that makes the ball slightly more likely to land on one side of the wheel than the other

The same is true for the random walk of the stock market. Becoming aware of information before it has propagated worldwide can give a speculator a tiny, temporary edge. Some traders pay a premium to locate their computer servers as close as possible to Lower Manhattan, gaining advantages measured in microseconds.

Taken to extremes, seeing connections that don’t exist can be a symptom of a psychiatric condition called apophenia. In less pathological forms, the brain’s hunger for pattern gives rise to superstitions (astrology, numerology) and is a driving factor in what has been called a replication crisis in science

I know it sounds crazy but when you average the scores together the answer is not 50-50, as most people would expect, but about 40-60 in favor of tails.

There is not, as Guildenstern might imagine, a tear in the fabric of space-time. It remains as true as ever that each flip is independent, with even odds that the coin will land one way or the other. But by concentrating on only some of the data — the flips that follow heads — a gambler falls prey to a selection bias.

basketball is no streakier than a coin toss. For a 50 percent shooter, for example, the odds of making a basket are supposed to be no better after a hit — still 50-50. But in a purely random situation, according to the new analysis, a hit would be expected to be followed by another hit less than half the time. Finding 50 percent would actually be evidence in favor of the hot hand

Dr. Gilovich is withholding judgment. “The larger the sample of data for a given player, the less of an issue this is,” he wrote in an email. “Because our samples were fairly large, I don’t believe this changes the original conclusions about the hot hand. ”

Take a fair coin — one as likely to land on heads as tails — and flip it four times. How often was heads followed by another head?

For all their care to be objective, scientists are as prone as anyone to valuing data that support their hypothesis over those that contradict it. Sometimes this results in experiments that succeed only under very refined conditions, in certain labs with special reagents and performed by a scientist with a hot hand.

We’re all in the same boat. We evolved with this uncanny ability to find patterns. The difficulty lies in separating what really exists from what is only in our minds.