If you are rolling dice and get on a hot streak, do you actually have any influence on the results? Intellectually we know that each throw of a pair of regular 6-sided dice would always return a number between 2 and 12. However, if you see someone continually rolling high, we tend to consider an explanation: maybe they are lucky, divine intervention shining upon them, weighted or flaw dice, or simply cheating with a trick on the throw. Previously I have posted about pattern recognition in talking about that need to find explanations.
Let’s say you flipped a coin 6 times and recorded how many times heads and tails came up. Looking at the data, you could infer a pattern among those 6 results and naturally draw a conclusion. If the results are evenly split, we might conclude the randomness was on target. But in all other case when the results were not evenly split, we’d see a different sort of pattern right? The results would not look “random”. That is because random is a reflection of the process itself and not the results.
When a critical thinker starts looking at complex issues where that difference is something they should keep in mind. The results will always appear to show a pattern that will generate the need to look for the causes of the pattern. To ensure the analysis is correct, one needs to check the process as well to see if there was any randomness applied. Just because that coin was flipped heads 6 times in a row, doesn’t necessarily mean the coin was two headed or the flipper was cheating.
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The chances of getting heads (or tails) from 6 flips of an unbiased coin are 1 in 64. These are long odds, but not impossible. Even random data will have streaks of results that look non-random; ascribing non-random behavior to a process that really is random is just the consequence of too small a sample size.