Human beings are not intuitively good at detecting randomness.  We see order where none exists.  We demand explanation where none is required.  The pattern seeking nature of our brains is what makes us different but sometimes it can lead us astray.  Experiments with split brain patients prove that when we don’t have an explanation for something, our brain will just make up an explanation that sounds plausible.

A Texan shoots at the side of a barn and then draws a target around the holes and claims he is a sharpshooter.  This is the humorous description of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.  When you find find a clump or cluster of something in a sea of randomness and you draw your target around the cluster you are doing the same thing.  Clusters are normal and expected in the real world.  When a cancer cluster is found in a neighborhood, people start looking for explanations in power lines and chemical plants.  They are doing little more than drawing targets around holes in a Texas barn.  I am not saying there can be no environmental cause, just that most of the time there is not; it’s just random clustering.

There is a professor, of whom I can remember no biographical information, who likes to do a demonstration for his class.  Two pairs of students are selected to record a series of 100 coin flips in his absence.  One pair is actually flipping a coin and recording the actual sequence, and the other pair is making up a fake series of flips.  It is very easy for the professor to detect the fake series upon his return.  The fake series does not contain enough streaks of heads or tails.  The clusters are missing.

I flipped a quarter 300 times.  At one point I had a series of nine consecutive heads.  If you picked up a quarter and flipped it nine times, the likelihood of getting nine heads would be extremely unlikely.  But finding such a streak in 300 flips is not all that unusual.  To draw your target around those after the fact and insist on an explanation makes no sense.  Here is a typically random twenty flips that to most people looks clumpy.  Six of the first seven flips are heads and seven of the last ten are tails

H T H H H H H T T H H T T H H T T H T T T T H T H

Everyone knows NBA basketball players get into the zone and go on hot shooting streaks and at other times go cold and can’t sink a shot to save their lives.  However, some scientists studied the Philadelphia 76er’s and proved that their hot and cold shooting streaks were no greater than would be expected by chance.  Their shooting streaks might has well have been coin flips.

I just dealt myself a bridge hand.  Below is the hand I drew where S=spades, C=clubs, H=hearts, and D=diamonds.

KD, 10D, 5D, QC, 10C, 3C, 8H, 2H, AS, 6S, 5S, 3S, 2S

It looks unremarkable right?  Here’s the thing.  The odds of me drawing that exact hand are 1 in 635 billion.  You will never get that hand in a card game for the rest of your life.  You are as likely to get all 13 spades as you are to get that hand.

Here are three possible coin flip series of ten flips:

H T T H H H T H T T H H H H H H H H H H

T T T T T T T T T T

All three series are equally likely.

All of this is counter-intuitive but it’s true.  What we often see as order or requiring explanation is nothing more than random patterns.