In which Wolf opens day 10's door... Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/cjwSl8np-uM
Welcome to the Beware of Wolf Advent Calendar of Bad Thinking. To celebrate the holidays, I'm counting down the days until Christmas with a common type of bad thinking each day, described in 60 seconds. This holiday season, give the gift of good thinking by sharing these videos with your friends!
Today is Day 10: "The Gambler's Fallacy"
In 1913 at a casino in Monte Carlo, the roulette table attracted a crowd. The ball had landed on black over and over. Everyone knew that the odds of this happening were tiny, and the odds of it happening again and again were even less likely, and yet it was happening. Feeling sure that the table was "hot" for the ball to land on red they bet large sums, knowing that sooner or later red had to come up. It did, but not until after 26 spins. Some people won money on that last spin, but others lost millions that night committing the "gambler's fallacy."
The gambler's fallacy is when you believe that a streak or pattern of independent events in the past will influence the odds of the same thing happening in the future. If a coin flipped 10 times comes up heads every time, it isn't true that it is now more likely to land on tails, the odds always remain the same no matter what happened in the past.
If you "reverse" the gambler's fallacy you get "the loser fallacy." Even if most of the mail you get is junk mail, you wouldn't throw it away without looking at it, because sometimes important things come in the mail too.
Just because something hasn't been successful doesn't mean that you should stop trying and give up. Likewise, even if something has been successful in the past, it doesn't guarantee that it will work again in the future.
Avoid costly mistakes by always weighing the evidence to make sure your decisions are rooted in facts. Do this, and you give yourself the best chance of succeeding, whatever happens.
Happy Holidays!