Friday, May 08, 2015
Failed to detect patterns of pattern detection
Some Kraut researcher excretes a bunch of the usual SAVANNAH - HUNTERGATHERER - OUTOFAFRICA - SABERTOOTHTIGER shit. In this case he invokes the usual shit to explain gambling:
The gamblers scored much lower on the test, and that impulsiveness accounted for their increased use of probability matching – in effect they were more likely to impulsively bet on their false sense of having spotted a pattern within randomness. "Gamblers have a stronger misperception of randomness, and are more willing to bet on it," said Gaissmaier. Gaissmaier thinks that probability matching is a side effect of humans' adaptive ability to spot patterns in noisy data, which would have been helpful when our pre-human ancestors were searching for food. "Evolution has primed us to have a low threshold for detecting patterns," he said. "The downside is that we get a lot of false alarms." Generally, those false alarms are harmless, but people prone to habitual gambling seem to have an even lower threshold, which, when combined with impulsiveness, can lead to problems, he says. But any treatment of gambling addiction would probably have to focus on the impulsiveness side.Who is this Evolution dude who "primes us" to detect patterns? And how did this ability arise through "random" mutations while we were being eaten by your SABERTOOTHTIGERS? I fucking dare you to show the sequence of mutations. Show your fucking work, asshole. The simple fact is that every living thing detects patterns. It's part of the single blueprint for all life. It's not as obvious or familiar in plants, but it's still there. Amazingly, Herr Professor Doktor Gaissmaier ends up with a partly correct solution despite his "unevolved" failure to detect patterns in actual life. What makes gamblers gamble has NOTHING to do with pattern recognition and EVERYTHING to do with a love of risk and thrills. And this range of personalities from coziness to riskiness is YET ANOTHER piece of Nature that shows up in EVERYTHING from bacteria to humans.
Labels: Grand Blueprint
¶ 5:07 AM
