Survival of the Sweaty Pattern Processors
Gary Smith, Jay Cordes · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2020
Pattern recognition prowess served our ancestors well. Today, we are hard-wired to notice patterns, and this innate search for patterns can help us understand our world and make better decisions. However, patterns are not always infallible. Sometimes, they are an illusion (like images of the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich). Sometimes, they are a meaningless coincidence whose importance we exaggerate (like giving birth at 7:11 on July 11). Sometimes, they are harmful (like buying lottery tickets based on a serendipitous pattern). We are tossed and turned by a deluge of data. The number of possible patterns that can be identified relative to the number that are genuinely useful has grown exponentially—which means that the chances that a discovered pattern is useful is rapidly approaching zero. We can easily be fooled by phantom patterns.