SEEING PATTERNS THAT AREN’T THERE.

SEEING PATTERNS THAT AREN’T THERE. In the interview, Philip Tetlock tells about an experiment which matched up Yale undergraduates against a Norwegian rat in a “T maze.” There was a reward available randomly 60% of the time if you turned left. The rat eventually learned to turn left all the time. The students looked for a pattern and wound up being right only 52% of the time. Tetlock says that the experiment shows the difficulty that people have in dealing with randomness. In the students’ defense, they knew they were in a designed experiment, and therefore might have anticipated that there was a pattern to what was happening.