I suppose it's not that much worse than other cases where people overreact to the appearance of clustering caused by true randomness (localized cancer scares, et al), but it's still funny how often it happens.
Really funny quote from a poker-themed bulletin board today. I'll paste the whole thing but be a sport and click here anyway and then click on an ad or two:
People who think [well-known poker site] is rigged are thinking waaay too small.
It's as if Newton got hit on the head with an apple and then decided gravity was somehow caused by trees and fruit.
[well-known poker site], rigged? It doesn't need to be. Poker is rigged. Life is rigged. Math is rigged. Randomness itself is a conspiracy cooked up by God to squeeze the maximum amount of pain and suffering out of his little flock of toy souls.
Yes there's a conspiracy, yes it involves [...], but only to the degree that it involves every other atom in the universe, which are all somehow magically lined up to produce, in the recursive awareness of human consciousness, the most exquisitely complex and fragile work of art and engineering conceivable and then, simultaneously, dump into this miracle an infinity of foul excrement - the 5 horsemen of BBV: ignorance, addiction, superstition, anger, and greed, and then ultimately pulverize it into a smoking heap of dead, oblivous, meaningless matter - BUSTO.
Poker is just one tentacle of the universal conspiracy called Entropy. But if we try very, very hard, we can make the leap from being one of its oblivious patsies to being one of its boot-licking junior functionaries.
So, shhhhhhh...
Posted by Matt Bruce at March 13, 2006 04:52 PM