The Drunkard's Walk

Because you have more important things to focus on when things go right, but it makes an impression when the lady in front of you with a single item in her cart decides to argue about why her chicken is priced at $1.50 a pound when she is certain the sign at the meat counter said $1.49.

In each case, even though the latter is less probable than the former, it may sound more likely. Or as Kahneman and Tversky put it, “A good story is often less probable than a less satisfactory…[explanation].”

If the details we are given fit our mental picture of something, then the more details in a scenario, the more real it seems and hence the more probable we consider it to be—even though any act of adding less-than-certain details to a conjecture makes the conjecture less probable.

There exists a vast gulf of randomness and uncertainty between the creation of a great novel—or piece of jewelry or chocolate-chip cookie—and the presence of huge stacks of that novel—or jewelry or bags of cookies—at the front of thousands of retail outlets. That’s why successful people in every field are almost universally members of a certain set—the set of people who don’t give up.

Humans usually try to guess the pattern, and in the process we allow ourselves to be outperformed by a rat. But there are people with certain types of post-surgical brain impairment—called a split brain—that precludes the right and left hemispheres of the brain from communicating with each other. If the probability experiment is performed on these patients such that they see the colored light or card with only their left eye and employ only their left hand to signal their predictions, it amounts to an experiment on the right side of the brain. But if the experiment is performed so as to involve only their right eye and right hand, it is an experiment on the left brain. When researchers performed those experiments, they found that—in the same patients—the right hemisphere always chose to guess the more frequent color and the left hemisphere always tried to guess the pattern.3

A FEW YEARS AGO a man won the Spanish national lottery with a ticket that ended in the number 48. Proud of his “accomplishment,” he revealed the theory that brought him the riches. “I dreamed of the number 7 for seven straight nights,” he said, “and 7 times 7 is 48.”