God forbade...must reading!

Randomness



   Fooled by Randomness, has become an English idiom used to describe when someone sees a pattern where there is just random noise.


   The book's author Nassim Taleb says modern humans are often unaware of the existence of randomness. They tend to explain random outcomes as non-random.

  Human beings overestimate causality, tend to view the world as with a more comfortable explanation than it really has. Explanations out of pure cloth.

  Other misperceptions of randomness include survivorship bias, we see winners and try to "learn" from them, while forgetting the huge number of losers.


  One of the most intriguing aspects is "vicarious learning ": that people can learn to be helpless through observing another person enduring uncontrollable events.


  These helpless experiences can associate with passivity, uncontrollability and poor cognition in people, ultimately threatening their physical and mental well-being.


    The American sociologist Harrison White has suggested in his book Identity and Control that the notion of learned helplessness can be extended beyond psychology into the realm of social action. When a culture or political identity fails to achieve desired goals, perceptions of collective ability suffer.



   An imaginary number, "recipriversexcluson" can only be defined as being anything other than itself. Professor John Wettlaufer (Yale) has apparently observed that it is very important for physicists working outside the mainstream "to have a genuine interest in learning about someone else's problem". However, he admitted that "not many people want to do this".







Wikipedia