The Reality Check Episode 72

Gambler's Fallacy + Cryonics + Super Freakonomics Review

Gambler's Fallacy

Part 1: 

So, what is the Gambler's fallacy? 

It's when people are gambling and when the a coin is flipped. If it came out tails for 5 times in a row, people will naturally think that the next one will be head to balance it out. The inverse gambler's fallacy is when people think the next flip will be tails again. This is actually a part of statistics and under the normal conditions, no matter what came before the coin toss, the next one will still be 1/2 for each side. 

It seems to obvious that no one will make this kind of mistake. But, when it's just a simple case as described above, then people usually won't fall for it. But then, if a coin has been tails for 20 times in a row, then people will think that it must be heads next time. The chance of getting 20 tails in a row is 2 to the power of 20, it's basically impossible. So, if that does happen, then there must be something wrong with the coin. 

Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman proposed that the gambler's fallacy is a cognitive bias produced by a psychological heuristic called the representativeness heuristic. According to this view, "after observing a long run of red on the roulette wheel, for example, most people erroneously believe that black will result in a more representative sequence than the occurrence of an additional red", so people expect that a short run of random outcomes should share properties of a longer run, specifically in that deviations from average should balance out. When people are asked to make up a random-looking sequence of coin tosses, they tend to make sequences where the proportion of heads to tails stays close to 0.5 in any short segment more so than would be predicted by chance; Kahneman and Tversky interpret this to mean that people believe short sequences of random events should be representative of longer ones. The representativeness heuristic is also cited behind the related phenomenon of the clustering illusion, according to which people see streaks of random events as being non-random when such streaks are actually much more likely to occur in small samples than people expect. -Wiki

Part 2: 

Cryonics is the low-temperature preservation of humans and animals who can no longer be sustained by contemporary medicine, with the hope that healing and resuscitation may be possible in the future. Cryopreservation of people or large animals is not reversible with current technology. The stated rationale for cryonics is that people who are considered dead by current legal or medical definitions may not necessarily be dead according to the more stringent information-theoretic definition of death. It is proposed that cryopreserved people might someday be recovered by using highly advanced future technology. The future repair technologies assumed by cryonics are still hypothetical and not widely known or recognized. Cryonics is, therefore, regarded with skepticism by most scientists and physicians, although some do support it. As of 2010, only around 200 people have undergone the procedure since it was first proposed in 1962. In the US, cryonics can only be legally performed on humans after they have been pronounced legally dead. Cryonics procedures ideally begin within minutes of cardiac arrest, and use cryoprotectants to prevent ice formation during cryopreservation. However, the idea of cryonics also includes preservation of people after longer post-mortem delays because of the possibility that brain structures encoding memory and personality may still persist or be inferable. Whether sufficient brain information still exists for cryonics to work under some preservation conditions may be intrinsically unprovable by present knowledge. Therefore, most proponents of cryonics see it as an intervention with prospects for success that vary widely depending on circumstances. -Wiki

Superfreakonomics

Science Myth of the Week: 

Summery of Superfreaknomics: 

Walking drunk is much more deadly than driving drunk.

How pimps are like Realtors.

Why suicide bombers should buy life insurance.

How Iran uses incentives, and not altruism, to get kidney donors.

Children who watch a lot of TV are more likely to engage in crime when they get older.

The profit motive encourages doctors to administer chemotherapy, even though it's not effective in saving more lives.

The Endangered Species Act has perverse incentives for landowners, causing them to clear habitat.

Buying locally produced food increases greenhouse-gas emissions.

You're more likely to solve global warming by throwing sulfur dioxide into the air than through any incentives Al Gore has in mind for getting people to use less energy.

Monkeys can learn the value of money, but don't let them go too far or they'll be having sex every minute.