If we want to improve our understanding of this complex world, we must first learn to deal with randomness: not every phenomenon can find the laws and causes behind it, we must learn to recognize randomness, admit that some things are unexplainable, unavoidable, and gladly accept the results it brings. If a person claims to be cognitively good, he must have two requirements: first, he must be scientific, and second, he must learn to accept randomness.
What exactly is the real random phenomenon in the human brain and in nature?Let's start with an example. There was a professor of statistics who, in the first class, gave students an assignment. He asked everyone to do a particularly tedious job, take out a coin, toss it 200 times in a row, and write down the result, plus or back, and carefully record it.
The professor reminded: "Don't be fake, I can see it." "The students didn't take it seriously, and they tossed coins continuously, didn't they just hand in a random number. Since random numbers are numbers with no regularity, it is not enough to make up an unregular result.
Sure enough, some students were lazy, and instead of honestly tossing a coin 200 times, they made up a record sheet to make a difference. Oddly enough, the professor was able to identify at a glance which students were lazy and didn't really flip a coin. How did the professor find out?
The record sheets made up by lazy students are all like this: positive and negative and positive. The reason why the professor can tell at a glance that the data is fake is because this record sheet is too "random". Counterfeiters believe that this is the only way to meet the characteristics of a "random phenomenon" such as a coin toss. They will try to avoid the same result multiple times in a row. That, they think, is "too unrandom."
In fact, if you really go and honestly flip a coin 200 times, you will find that there will be a lot of heads or tails six or seven times in a row, and the real result will be like this: positive and negative positive and negative positive and positive and positive.
People who understand probability can explain this phenomenon with a little calculation.
If you toss a coin 10 times, the probability of the result being heads is very small, only 1 1024, which is extremely unlikely, but when you toss enough times, the situation is different.
If you roll 710 times, the probability of 10 consecutive heads is 50%, half to half.
What if you roll 5,000 times?The probability of 10 consecutive heads-up occurrences reached 993%。
If you roll 10,000 times, the probability is 9999%, at this point, it is almost certain that there will be 10 heads in a row.
The assignment assigned by the professor is cunning, and 200 coin tosses are bound to occur six or seven times in a row. If you can't see this situation, you can only see a more chaotic and random record of the results, and you don't need to ask, it's a fake made by the students who are lazy.
If you understand this truth, you will know what the phenomenon of "hand heat" on the basketball court is. Each team in the NBA plays 82 games per season in the regular season alone, and with the playoffs, the total number of games played in a season is more than 1,000 across the league. Both players must have more than 100 shots per game, which means that the total number of shots in a season must exceed 100,000.
With such a large amount of data, several consecutive hits by a player are like flipping a coin multiple heads in a row, which is the so-called "hot hand", which is a typical random phenomenon. If it doesn't, that's weird. However, no matter how regular it seems, it is still random behind it, and it is impossible to capture the so-called pattern.
The human mind is patterned. Man has to understand the world according to a certain model, or a certain theory. It's hard to accept a world where there's no reason, no explanation, just randomness and luck. It is always difficult to find out the reasons behind the phenomena. This psychological mechanism is very important, and without this psychological mechanism, science would not have been able to produce and develop.
What's interesting about this finding is that the opposite of superstition used to be thought to be science, but it wasn't. Superstition and science are actually looking for laws, but science pays attention to methods and evidence, while superstition is nonsense. In this sense, superstition and science, on the contrary, are close relatives, both in line with the human instinct to find the cause of the phenomenon.
What is the antonym of superstition?In fact, it is an acknowledgment of uncertainty, an acknowledgment of randomness, an acknowledgment that some things are unexplainable, unavoidable, and gladly accepting the results it brings. If a person claims to be cognitively good, he must have two requirements: first, he must be scientific, and second, he must learn to accept randomness.