Someone tosses a coin ten times; it comes up heads every time. What's the probability it comes up heads on the next toss? (Pretty darn high—part of @nntaleb's work is unprogramming you from your high-school rules of thumb.) Now consider the (related) Gambler's fallacy...

In this case, it's a theory about compensation: the worse one's luck is, the more likely it is to see a reversal. On the surface, it's irrational. The more bad luck you have, the more you accumulate evidence that the system is rigged.
But there's also an anthropic component. If the luck is bad enough, it starts to become inconsistent with your survival. You've accumulated evidence for correlations in the environment, but these correlations (may be) inconsistent with (people like you) being in this environment.
An example. You're in a city where everyone takes public transport. You encounter a string of bad delays. It's reasonable to conclude they'll end—otherwise people wouldn't take public transport. It's unlikely that you happened to show up right when the network collapses.
Of course, that's a bad heuristic in a casino, which relies on a constant influx of losers. But in other environments, particularly with persistent populations and no evidence for sudden changes in the underlying laws, it makes sense.
Another example: the three-card monte scam in a big city. You meet some guys on the corner, who convince you to go in on the game. You win, a few times. The more you win, the more you ought to be convinced that your luck will turn. Otherwise, how are these guys there?
(In this case, the anthropic reasoning concerns the scamsters—it's unlikely that you showed up right when their operation starts to fall apart.)
The general principle, which again is due to @nntaleb, is a new kind of failure. The "IYI", intellectual-yet-idiot. IMO, this is driven by standardized testing—we started to promote people on the basis of their ability to internalize fake-but-difficult-to-master rules...
In a previous cycle, the British ran their empire by fast-tracking twelve year olds who could master Latin grammar. The ambiguities of interpretation make this a much better idea than the SAT version, where one learns more abstract "grammars"—e.g., integration by parts.
Everything can be degraded, of course. When I give CMU students the coin-toss problem, it's usually unfamiliar enough that they're thrown back on a more complex, and life-integrated, form of reasoning. But ask that question enough, and tutors will arise to teach the solution...
...which negates the original value of the puzzle. (BTW, nearly all the students "get it", which bodes well for our future engineers.)
A final thought on this, before I get back to my real work. If you pose this kind of problem as a teacher, there's a second level to what's going on: your students are also modeling you! (and your class.)
i.e., they're asking themselves—is this a class where we're all living in la-la land, or is there some substance here, some connection to our own lived experience?
So, yes, I'm proud that most of my students get it. :)
This is lovely—yes! "I can't be the only idiot" summarizes why we keep waiting for the train with rising hope. https://t.co/s3d4aFg7Tv
You might also connect it to the bulk-vs-long-tail. "I'm not the only idiot" is true when there are repeated tests of the system of similar magnitude.
OK, truly one last thought. A scam is more likely to succeed if you're doing something new, but can convince people you've always been around, that this is "normal". Certainly psychologically obvious, but it's fun to look at it from the point of view of rational analysis.
(In the case where the scam operates by inducing the Concorde/sunk-cost fallacy—slowly extracting money from the person, who continues to believe in a final payoff.)

More from Simon DeDeo

This is a pretty valiant attempt to defend the "Feminist Glaciology" article, which says conventional wisdom is wrong, and this is a solid piece of scholarship. I'll beg to differ, because I think Jeffery, here, is confusing scholarship with "saying things that seem right".


The article is, at heart, deeply weird, even essentialist. Here, for example, is the claim that proposing climate engineering is a "man" thing. Also a "man" thing: attempting to get distance from a topic, approaching it in a disinterested fashion.


Also a "man" thing—physical courage. (I guess, not quite: physical courage "co-constitutes" masculinist glaciology along with nationalism and colonialism.)


There's criticism of a New York Times article that talks about glaciology adventures, which makes a similar point.


At the heart of this chunk is the claim that glaciology excludes women because of a narrative of scientific objectivity and physical adventure. This is a strong claim! It's not enough to say, hey, sure, sounds good. Is it true?
"I lied about my basic beliefs in order to keep a prestigious job. Now that it will be zero-cost to me, I have a few things to say."


We know that elite institutions like the one Flier was in (partial) charge of rely on irrelevant status markers like private school education, whiteness, legacy, and ability to charm an old white guy at an interview.

Harvard's discriminatory policies are becoming increasingly well known, across the political spectrum (see, e.g., the recent lawsuit on discrimination against East Asian applications.)

It's refreshing to hear a senior administrator admits to personally opposing policies that attempt to remedy these basic flaws. These are flaws that harm his institution's ability to do cutting-edge research and to serve the public.

Harvard is being eclipsed by institutions that have different ideas about how to run a 21st Century institution. Stanford, for one; the UC system; the "public Ivys".

More from Crypto

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Funny, before the election I recall lefties muttering the caravan must have been a Trump setup because it made the open borders crowd look so bad. Why would the pro-migrant crowd engineer a crisis that played into Trump's hands? THIS is why. THESE are the "optics" they wanted.


This media manipulation effort was inspired by the success of the "kids in cages" freakout, a 100% Stalinist propaganda drive that required people to forget about Obama putting migrant children in cells. It worked, so now they want pics of Trump "gassing children on the border."

There's a heavy air of Pallywood around the whole thing as well. If the Palestinians can stage huge theatrical performances of victimhood with the willing cooperation of Western media, why shouldn't the migrant caravan organizers expect the same?

It's business as usual for Anarchy, Inc. - the worldwide shredding of national sovereignty to increase the power of transnational organizations and left-wing ideology. Many in the media are true believers. Others just cannot resist the narrative of "change" and "social justice."

The product sold by Anarchy, Inc. is victimhood. It always boils down to the same formula: once the existing order can be painted as oppressors and children as their victims, chaos wins and order loses. Look at the lefties shrieking in unison about "Trump gassing children" today.