Beware of apophenia!

Reply #12

Raven62 — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 14:26:32 GMT

Statistical regularity is a notion in statistics and probability theory that random events exhibit regularity when repeated enough times or that enough sufficiently similar random events exhibit regularity.

Repeating a series of trials will produce similar, but not identical, results for each series: the average, the standard deviation and other distributional characteristics will be around the same for each series of trials.

The notion is used in games of chance, demographic statist... [ More ]

Reply #11

pumpi76 — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:26:09 GMT

Want to know something weird, for years i've battled with Carl Jung Sinchronicity, because it happens to me a lot, well it used to not as much nowadays...when it happens to me i get SO MAD because my head can't take it...

Want to know something interesting...like 8 years ago i had just gotten out of the Navy Bootcamp in Great Lakes, Illinois close to Chicago and we were told we could go out and have fun or go anywhere we wanted to so i chose to go and watch a movie in the mall and i went and... [ More ]

Reply #10

SmoothJuice — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 04:27:43 GMT

HAHAHAHAHAH

Reply #9

Coin Toss — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 03:54:03 GMT

Sirvalebeos

According to its definition from Wikipedia, apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data.

Gee, the main character in the TV Series NUMB3RS sees patterns in everything

Reply #8

BobP — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 20:39:38 GMT

Lottery drawings are random enough to conduct a lottery.

Some numbers have certainly proven to be more probable up to now.

Looking at a hundred draws since the last ballset collection change out, and seeing how the more and less drawn numbers do for the next 100 draws I've found they tend to continue their more and less drawn ratio until the ballsets are once again replaced resulting in a third of each group changing to another rate of draw. This is Florida, your mileage may vary.... [ More ]

Reply #7

Todd — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 19:22:54 GMT

I would say that true randomness is where any outcome has the exact same chance of happening, and there is no external influence on the outcome of the event.

Over time, a truly random sequence of events will tend to fall in line with the odds of each possibility, which is one of the many reasons why lottery players feel that tracking past drawings is an important factor in choosing numbers for an upcoming drawing. Even though each number in the upcoming drawing is random (supposedly), if one

Reply #6

diamondpalace — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 18:43:01 GMT

Perhaps the apophenia can help us win.

Reply #5

Sirvalebeos — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 16:26:13 GMT

Raven62,

I just discovered your interesting post at https://www.lotterypost.com/thread/192197/1278885

Your argument The mathematical conceptions of randomness involve deviations fromdistributions which are infinite in size. No empirical process can betested against this idealized notion of randomness because we can'tcollect an infinite number of data points. is very well aimed.

Do you know Alan Hajek's arguments against frequentism and other simplified views on randomness and probabilit... [ More ]

Reply #4

Raven62 — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:51:34 GMT

Apophenia is the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena. The term was coined by K. Conrad in 1958.

Brugger's research indicates that high levels of dopamine affect the propensity to find meaning, patterns, and significance where there is none, and that this propensity is related to a tendency to believe in the paranormal.

See also: pareidolia, sympathetic magic, and synchronicity.

Pareidolia is a type of illusion or misperception involvi... [ More ]

Reply #3

Sirvalebeos — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:31:23 GMT

I could say that lottery is random or it is not random. First I want to be really sure what random means.

Then I want to know, is there any full scientific agreement about meaning of probability .

If science has no agreement about these terms, and we are dealing with probability of random

events, then we are doubly lost. Or maybe we should find our own ways.

By the way: isn't the science as a whole one big epidemy of apophenia? Thousands and thousands

of people searching for patt... [ More ]

Reply #2

Fibonacci — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:01:22 GMT

There is a running debate among psychiatrists whether apophenia is a true mental disorder.

All religious peoples would become immediate patients. Perceiving a god or answers to prayer or miracles in a universe governed by chance, caprice and natural selection would fall under this rubric.

Notice that in Stats a hypothesis is apophenic only when the data under consideration is in fact random. A rigged lottery or those ubiquitous computerized drawings would be exceptions.

So to

Reply #1

Vergie6 — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 12:55:24 GMT

Thanks Sirvalebeos, you have given us something to think about

Beware of apophenia!

Sirvalebeos — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 12:45:55 GMT

Hello!

All lotto analysts and lotto players are vulnerable to dangerous disease: apophenia.

At least this state of mind is attributed as disease - but is it really?

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According to its definition from Wikipedia, apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns

or connections in random or meaningless data.

In statistics, apophenia would be classed as a Type I