{"id":2293,"date":"2009-04-06T09:50:01","date_gmt":"2009-04-06T16:50:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2009\/04\/06\/perceiving-randomness\/"},"modified":"2009-04-06T09:50:01","modified_gmt":"2009-04-06T16:50:01","slug":"perceiving-randomness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2009\/04\/06\/perceiving-randomness\/","title":{"rendered":"Perceiving Randomness"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The kind way to say it is:  &#8220;Humans are really good at detecting patterns.&#8221;  The less kind way is:  &#8220;Humans are really good at detecting patterns, even when they don&#8217;t exist.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m going to blatantly swipe these two pictures from <a href=\"http:\/\/telescoper.wordpress.com\/2009\/04\/04\/points-and-poisson-davril\/\">Peter Coles<\/a>, but you should read his post for more information.  The question is:  which of these images represents a collection of points selected randomly from a distribution with uniform probability, and which has correlations between the points?  (The relevance of this exercise to cosmologists studying distributions of galaxies should be obvious.)<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/telescoper.wordpress.com\/2009\/04\/04\/points-and-poisson-davril\/\"><img src='http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/files\/2009\/04\/randompoints.gif' alt='randompoints.gif' \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The points on the right, as you&#8217;ve probably guessed from the set up, are distributed completely randomly.  On the left, there are important <a href=\"http:\/\/telescoper.wordpress.com\/2009\/04\/04\/points-and-poisson-davril\/\">correlations<\/a> between them.<\/p>\n<p>Humans are not very good at generating random sequences; when asked to come up with a &#8220;random&#8221; sequence of coin flips from their heads, they inevitably include too few long strings of the same outcome.  In other words, they think that randomness looks a lot more uniform and structureless than it really does.  The flip side is that, when things really are random, they see patterns that aren&#8217;t really there.  It might be in coin flips or distributions of points, or it might involve <a href=\"http:\/\/cas.bellarmine.edu\/tietjen\/RootWeb\/VirginMaryCheese.htm\">the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich<\/a>, or the <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2007\/11\/27\/things-happen-not-always-for-a-reason\/\">insistence on assigning blame for random unfortunate events<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Bonus link uncovered while doing our characteristic in-depth research for this post:  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.random.org\/coins\/\">flip ancient coins online<\/a>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The kind way to say it is: &#8220;Humans are really good at detecting patterns.&#8221; The less kind way is: &#8220;Humans are really good at detecting patterns, even when they don&#8217;t exist.&#8221; I&#8217;m going to blatantly swipe these two pictures from Peter Coles, but you should read his post for more information. The question is: which [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2293\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}