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Episode 49: Born a Gamblin' Gob
104 Plays6 years ago
Hello, Podwalkers, and welcome to the Goblin Lore Podcast!
In our forty-ninth episode, Alex and Joe discuss a goblin character not yet physically seen in Magic: the Gathering lore – Krark, of the Mirrodin goblins – and the clan he founded and inspired. This clan of goblins was the one that adopted Slobad when he was found cast out into the wilderness, but they are superstitious and irrational...
Much like the Gambler's Fallacy in the real world! The two pick apart the little we know of this mysterious goblin tribe, the card Krark's Thumb, and how both of these are a good lens for viewing the "hot hand" or "evening out" probability theory of the Gambler's Fallacy in the real world.
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You can find the hosts on Twitter: Joe Redemann at @Fyndhorn, Hobbes Q. at @HobbesQ, and Alex Newman at @AlexanderNewm. Send questions, comments, thoughts, hopes, and dreams to @GoblinLorePod on Twitter or GoblinLorePodcast@gmail.com.
Opening and closing music by Wintergatan (@wintergatan). Logo art by Steven Raffael (@SteveRaffle).
Goblin Lore is proud to be presented by Hipsters of the Coast, and a part of their growing Vorthos content – as well as Magic content of all kinds. Check them out at hipstersofthecoast.com.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Episode and Hosts
00:00:15
Speaker
Hello and welcome to another episode of Goblin Lord. In this episode we are going to be discussing Gambler's Fallacy and specifically how it relates to a couple of our favorite goblins, the Kark Clan of Mirrodin. But before we get to that, we have a couple of introductions to make.
00:00:37
Speaker
And by a couple, I literally mean two, a pair of introductions to make, and an answer to our ever-present question of the day. And that question of the day is, if you had a million dollars to bet on something related to magic, what bet would you make?
Betting Predictions and Humor
00:00:54
Speaker
Hi, I'm Alex Newman. I found on Twitter at Alexander Newham. And I think the bet that I would make is that wizards will never make the Nephilim from
00:01:06
Speaker
Ravnica legendary. Because see, people, they're these crazy four color things that have some really cool unique abilities, but they aren't legends because back in the original Ravnica days, commander was not a format and their hope was that by making them non legendary, people could play four of them and it would make them more likely to be played. But that
00:01:30
Speaker
that doesn't happen and now commander exists. So people have been asking Mark Rosewater to change that and he's like, Oh, well, we don't do functional errata except Wizards has done some functional errata lately with dinosaurs and burn spells and planeswalkers. So I'm gonna just say that maybe they won't because if they don't and I get money, that's great. But if they do,
00:01:56
Speaker
Then I get to build commander decks out of the five methods. It's a win-win situation for you, yeah. Exactly. Isn't that like a perfect bet or something? Isn't that a thing? I don't know. I don't gamble. Yeah, it's the perfect crime. Absolutely. Yeah, there you go. Exactly.
00:02:10
Speaker
And I'm Joe Redman. You can find me on Twitter at Finhorn. That's F-Y-N-D Horn. And if I had a million dollars to bet on something magic related, I would bet that we are never, ever, ever, ever going to see the plain of old growth again in magic story.
00:02:31
Speaker
And I am so sad about that. That is much to my dismay that I have to make that bet. But I know truly in my heart of hearts that we're not going to get it again, at least in like the main narrative sort of like we might get it in supplemental products and like associated stories with that. But they are never going to, you know,
00:02:50
Speaker
Close up the the mana draining rifts that that'll grow that has and the same gears are still gonna be stuck there and everyone's gonna be bummed out and Ravi's still gonna be stuck in a dang tomb reading the the apocalypse chime. So I'm bummed But on the other hand that that's another bet that you can't lose. That's true. That's true as if because if they do go back and
00:03:16
Speaker
You got, you finally got them to go back to old growth. I should say you finally have a set in old growth to have fun with. Is that, well, if I could, if it could be me that got them to go back to old growth, do you think a million dollars would make it happen? Because maybe we can get things up to that level. Crowdfund that, you think? Yeah, yeah. That could be a Patreon stretch goal, right?
00:03:41
Speaker
We could get at least three people to donate. I mean, at least two people to donate to that. Yeah, absolutely. That's all you need. Just three to cover $333,000. No big deal. Just get some seed money to start it, right? That's how those work.
00:03:56
Speaker
So loyal Gabo listeners, if three of you want to contribute at the $333,333 level, we will petition Wizards and by petition, I do mean bribe them to return us to Ogrotha in magic lore.
Listener Interaction and Mental Health Focus
00:04:13
Speaker
Speaking of our listeners, of our patrons, of all this sort of stuff, I do want to actually, before we get into the main topic, I also want to take a second to read a review that someone left for us on Apple Podcasts or, you know, formerly iTunes? That's something like iTunes Podcasts. iPods? Iscapes? At one point it was just part of, like,
00:04:41
Speaker
iTunes itself and then they pull it into its own app or something.
00:04:45
Speaker
If you can find it, then we would love a rating and review is super cool We don't blame you if you can't because we don't remember the name, but that's not surprising for us cops lugs But yeah, this is a five-star review from Marcus Bremen and The title is a completely different dot dot dot. I don't know the full title But maybe I'm just not finding it here
00:05:12
Speaker
Um, but Marcus writes, been listening since episode one and surprised I never left a review. Your friendly local goblins talk about an interesting Vorthos topic, but then expand on it into real life implications. We do do that. I'm really proud that I'm really proud that that came across.
00:05:27
Speaker
The positive focus in mental health discussions are top-notch highly recommended for anyone that believes the best part of magic is bettering yourself and those around you and I don't know about you Alex, but that just really warms the cockles of my heart because that's I mean, yeah, that's exactly what we're going for and and Marcus it seems to really have been touched by that. So thank you Marcus for for putting that out there and for reviewing and
00:05:54
Speaker
Yeah, and it also is a wonderful opportunity for me to get to say the thing that I hear a lot of content creators say, but now I finally get to say it as a content creator, that it's really great to see those things because that's our intention. Our intention is to try to have this, to talk about the game and have fun, but to have this focus on mental health, to have a focus on kind of bettering yourself and making just things better. The world can be a dark place and we want to try to be some light in that.
00:06:24
Speaker
And it's great to know that that worked, that we actually hit that goal, because we don't necessarily know. I mean, and we do get in this, we've got reviews, and we get interactions on Twitter and stuff, and we love all of that. And so I just want to encourage you to, if you want to talk to us or other content creators, please go tell them or tell us and just what you that you enjoy the content and what you're getting out of it, because it is just
00:06:53
Speaker
It's wonderful to see. Absolutely. Yep, absolutely.
Main Topic: Gambling and Kark's Thumb
00:06:57
Speaker
I just want to second that. Anytime somebody contributes some good content to your life and you appreciate it, just go send them a ping. You never know, it might be the thing that just makes their day.
00:07:12
Speaker
But I don't have a good transition for this, and if that's not the most goblin lore sort of transition, I don't know what is. We're going to talk about gambling. We're going to talk about something, rather than light and happy things, we're going to talk about something seedy and deliciously savory here.
00:07:33
Speaker
gambling and specifically where we tied into gambling in magic lore is Because of the card from Mirrodin Quark's thumb, which is a legendary artifact. The art is by the ever-wonderful Ron Spencer Really really great stuff like if you if you remember all of the art from like the 90s of
00:07:59
Speaker
The late 90s early 2000s cards that felt like super metal super like heavy metal Ron Spencer Illustrated it. It was great and Crocs thumb is Literally a thumb on a chain kind of like a lucky rabbits tail a lucky lucky rabbits foot. That's what it is
00:08:19
Speaker
And it's a goblin thumb. And the text of this says, if you would flip a coin, instead flip two coins and ignore one. So you're fixing your luck a little bit here. It's helping to get you a slightly more favorable outcome for yourself.
00:08:39
Speaker
And the flavor text here, of course, is from one of our favorite friends, Slobad Goblin Tinkler. And he says, I can think of one goblin it ain't so lucky for. Just zoomably. Both goblin flavor text from a goblin, which is wonderful, but it's also great, like goblin brand flavor text. Just a little bit of kind of dark humor, not a horrible. I like it. I like that a lot.
00:09:06
Speaker
That's perfect. Well, and so Krakk was a goblin that created or was the, I guess, the leader of this clan of goblins on Mirden. It's where we get the Krakk clan Ironworks, which is recently banned from Modern.
00:09:24
Speaker
tribe of goblins that is particularly superstitious. When they took Slobad in, they did so very begrudgingly. The leader of the clan, who became his surrogate father, had to really convince them to
00:09:43
Speaker
Bring slow bat in because slow bat was abandoned by his original parents because he was born under us Apparently a bad sign in the stars or the moon and all this sort of like Superstitious type of hocus pocus stuff and this is apparently a widely held belief throughout the entire clan and so they're very focused on luck and superstition and like
00:10:08
Speaker
you know, that fates in destiny controls so many things. And so that's kind of where we enter this idea of the gambler's fallacy in magic. Yeah.
Understanding the Gambler's Fallacy
00:10:20
Speaker
And so I want to talk about what the gambler's fallacy is. And I also want to mention before we go too far, and I forget, this was actually a listener suggested topic. It was on Twitter in response to a thread
00:10:37
Speaker
It was months ago and I didn't write down who had the idea and I feel really bad about it, so I'm sorry. But yeah, totally got the idea to do something about the Gambler's Fallacy from a listener, which is just great. But what the Gambler's Fallacy is, it is a fallacy about statistics. It's kind of looking at numbers wrong, which is really easy to do and I think we'll get into that, but numbers are weird.
00:11:07
Speaker
But the gamblers fallacy is basically saying that is looking at past results and saying that this has to dictate future statistics or future results based on the statistics. And I think the easiest quick example is a coin flip coin flip. We all know heads tails 50% chance to get either one. And so the gamblers fallacy says you've gotten heads 10 times in a row.
00:11:30
Speaker
That means, obviously, the 11th flip has to be tails. It makes sense, right? It's got to balance out. It's got to balance out. There is a logic to it. Yeah, and there is a logic to it. Or, you know, and it's kind of on the other side that says, you know, you may get... There's something similar on the other side where you might say, well, this coin just flips heads. I mean, and there's... We can get into that too. There's sometimes there's slivers of truth to this, which is part of the difficulties.
00:11:58
Speaker
Maybe the thing isn't balanced right, so it is always flipping one side. But all other things being equal, there's 50% chance of a result. Every single time you do the thing, it's 50% chance one or the other. The past results do not count towards the future. And so this is a thing that comes up a lot.
00:12:18
Speaker
When you're rolling dice, I know as a player of Dungeons and Dragons, this happens a lot with dice. Ultimately, this is a place where it's not harmful. It's kind of fun and people joke about it. But if you're rolling your 20-sided die, which is the main die in most of these games, your result of 20, by and large, is going to be the best result. Your roll of one is going to be catastrophic sometimes, just bad other times.
00:12:45
Speaker
And so you'll see D&D players who roll a one, a two, three times in a row on a die and just be like, nope, I'm done with this die. Or even if it's just low results, I get a three and a five and a seven, I'm probably putting that die aside and I'm picking up a second die. And so this is another easy, small example of the gambler's fallacy.
00:13:05
Speaker
Right. It's sort of a streakiness sort of thing. It's more of a belief in, like you were saying, in past results determining the future as opposed to, you know, understanding the idea of probability versus certainty of something being
00:13:23
Speaker
in the case of like a coin flip or a die roll that is like a contained like pure chance sort of situation and you could get into the minutia of like oh well if you're rolling a die you know that's not perfectly weighted on every side or it's on a slanted table or it's
00:13:44
Speaker
you know, thrown with different force every single time. Like, yeah, all those little things will change a slight amount, but that's about as self-contained of a random situation as you can get. Whereas you have some situations like, you know, the hot hand fallacy is kind of the opposite effect that you were talking about, right?
00:14:04
Speaker
where the if a streak is going you think the streak has to continue um and and so that's that's actually something that for instance a lot of people in sports tend to believe so if a player in baseball is hitting really well you say like oh the next time he comes up he's got he's got to get a hit i mean he's been hitting so well he's he's they say like he's seeing the ball really well and it's like yeah maybe he is
00:14:33
Speaker
Those are situations where there's a little more skill involved or there's another sort of Source involved for baseball. It'd be like the pitcher and the batter, you know, those are two sources of Sort of skill as opposed to just pure chance whereas something contained like a dice Rollo or coin flip. That's that's pure luck Yeah Yeah, and and
00:14:57
Speaker
you know, there's some smaller things and there's things like that. I think it's something to watch out for because the the humans mind and this is a topic I found fascinating and we are
Pattern Recognition and Logical Fallacies
00:15:11
Speaker
really, really good at finding patterns. And so we will find patterns like that. And this may be is a tangent, but that's something that we're wanting to do here. So
00:15:25
Speaker
And there's no one to stop us, so I think I'm just going to allow this. Nice. And so we tend to see things like this. I'm like, OK. Well, I mean, again, it's one of those things where you tend to believe. It's a survival thing, really. Like, it's one of those things that was an evolutionary sort of skill that we developed to see
00:15:51
Speaker
to see the past, to see history, to see the things that we've encountered and shape our perception of what's to come based on those things. You go, okay, this particular dog, I'm thinking about my mail routes. If I know a particular dog that has been kind and sweet, that has allowed me to come up to it and pet it every single time,
00:16:16
Speaker
Then I, you know, then I have no issue going up and delivering mail while that dog's out in the front yard. But if there's a dog that I don't know, I have no frame of reference for it. I have no pattern built up in my mind about how that dog will act. And so I'm going to skip that house. You know, so it's one of those things where that's, that's, you know, it's an evolutionary thing for us to acquire these patterns and build them in. Yes. Yeah. Thank you for picking that up. Cause that was something I wanted to talk about. It's, that's,
00:16:45
Speaker
A big part of human development was this pattern recognition, but what it does is it also leads us to see patterns where they don't exist, where people will say, well, this happened however many times or something. This can't be a coincidence. It's like, yeah, it actually can. Things are vastly more random, maybe. There's not nearly as much structure and pattern behind things as we sometimes think, because we will recognize patterns and we'll say,
00:17:14
Speaker
X happened, then Y happened. X happened, then Y happened. That is the whole causal fallacy thing, that just because causation does not equal correlation. That is used a lot in statistics. You'll say, well, this number is up by 40%, and this other number is up by 100. So that must mean the first number caused the second number. And it's like, well, when I was going to school, this is a thing that you talk about in philosophy a lot.
00:17:44
Speaker
It's logical fallacies and one of my classes I love one of the first assignments we had was we had this whole list of logical fallacies and we had to come up with arguments that used the logical fallacies and so my logical fallacy for correlation does not equal causation is that ice cream consumption causes heat stroke. Because during very hot weather your ice cream consumption will increase
00:18:10
Speaker
as will incidences of heat stroke. Oh my gosh, yeah. Sure. And so there is like, again, there's a tying factor and that's hot weather. Like, so there is something, again, there's a logic to it, but it's a fallacy. It's not a direct correlation. It's not properly drawn because there's a lot more steps in between for that shaky logic. Yep. And that's one of those people will often arrive at X goes up, Y goes up, therefore X must cause Y and they don't look for underlying causes.
00:18:41
Speaker
which in that particular case, there is an underlying cause. But in many other cases, there may not even be an underlying cause that links both of them. Those two things might just be happening. And this is something to really watch out for. It is used a lot in politics. It is very easy to pull two statistics and show how crime rates are increasing because X, Y, or Z, or this is happening because this.
00:19:10
Speaker
both because of depending on what data set they're using, because you can critique data to save whatever you want. And then by ignoring certain places, by going to zooming in on one city or one region, and then saying, well, look at the statistics here, you have gun laws go in and then crimes go up, except you're not looking at the whole picture. And if you really want to come to
00:19:39
Speaker
figure things out, you need to look at all the pictures. But again, human mind is good at finding these patterns. And so people will draw that straight line, and then they think they figured it out.
00:19:51
Speaker
Yeah. And again, it's short-cutting. It's intellectual short-cutting for us where I think we are going to assume for this discussion that we are being, you know, generous about it. Is that the proper way to say it? Ingenuous? It's not disingenuous. We're not like, I don't think we want to get into the discussion of like people who, you know, deliberately warp graphs to confuse it and mess with people. That's a completely other thing. Yeah, that is another thing.
00:20:21
Speaker
But it is that notion that we go through on a day-to-day basis where we do look at something and go, well, this is how it has to be because this is how it's always been, or this is how it has to be because it's always been this other way, and so it's got to shift at some point. Or small cases, too. You can look at things like it took you 10 minutes to drive home one way, it took you eight minutes to drive home the second way. Therefore, the second way is always faster.
00:20:49
Speaker
But if that is the only thing you're looking at, you're not looking at mitigating circumstances. Right, you're not looking at the time of day that you drove home. You're not looking at, you know, was there construction? Yeah, it snowed the first day and it was clear whether the second day or, you know, there's so many factors. Yeah.
Impact on Magic: The Gathering Players
00:21:06
Speaker
And this is a thing we don't talk about the game of magic too much because we're mostly a forthos podcast. We want to talk about story and things. That's what really we're passionate about.
00:21:17
Speaker
But the game of magic is a place where this can come into effect, too, where this can hurt you. I know I don't play as much magic as I used to, so I don't really listen to limited resources like I used to. But on that podcast, Marshall Sutcliffe talks and Luis LSV right now, other hosts in the past, talk a lot about limited magic and booster draft in particular. And that's the thing they talk about a lot is
00:21:46
Speaker
building card assessments based on a very small sample size. If you play one or two games, that's not going to tell you the whole extent of how this stuff works. It'll give you data points. And those data points can build to a complete picture, but one or two data points is not a complete picture. And so you have to be careful about that.
00:22:05
Speaker
right absolutely yeah it's it's it's it is kind of just that bringing in as much information as possible so that you can make a an educated decision you know because life on the whole you know isn't a coin flip it's not a die roll it's
00:22:25
Speaker
it's a lot of complicated moving parts with people of you know with agents of varying amount of skill and experience and you know i mean we are just working with a lot of information coming at us on a day-to-day basis so you do have to kind of evaluate like which of these things is more influential in this moment and and sort of um
00:22:50
Speaker
deal with it that way i was actually speaking of limited resources i was just listening to them the other day and they talked about this a little in the sense of like draft philosophy when you're evaluating a card you can't just go like oh this one's more powerful you have to go okay well i've drafted five cards
00:23:10
Speaker
in in mono red so far and this one is a blue black card like that doesn't fit what i'm doing even though it's the most powerful card sitting here like is it enough is it powerful enough to move me off of my plan you know and that's that sort of thing where you you have to look at these things all as factors into your day-to-day life
00:23:29
Speaker
And I think even though this is a little bit removed from this, it's something that reminded me of our discussion of randomness and all this sort of stuff. It reminded me of an Albert Camus quote, who's a famous philosopher. Gosh, I can't remember if he was, I think he's technically in the absurdist
00:23:52
Speaker
sort of camp. But he talked a lot about, he wrote a great paper called The Myth of Sisyphus, which is all about like, even if life has no inherent meaning, we find and make meaning of our own. But this quote specifically talks about like chaos and you know, how life is random and throws random stuff at you. And so this is the quote here.
00:24:18
Speaker
The world is never quiet, even if silence eternally resounds with the same notes and vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us. Occasionally a chord, never a melody.
00:24:33
Speaker
And I love that. I really love that because it's the idea that sometimes things line up, like your metaphor about the eight minute drive home as opposed to the 10. Things may be lined up really well on that day, but that doesn't mean that that's going to be melodic and happening that same way every single time you play that song, quote unquote, of driving home.
Historical Anecdote: Casino de Monte Carlo
00:25:01
Speaker
Do we want to talk a little bit of history of the gamblers fallacy too because there's a really cool story about this that I just read about Yeah, do that both both on the Wikipedia page. I'll be honest. I'll cite my sources, but I found There's a BBC article where they wrote about this as well And I love that this article is called why we gamble like monkeys I
00:25:24
Speaker
That's beautiful. They talked about this happening on August 18th, 1913 at the Casino de Monte Carlo on this date in 1913 during a game of roulette, which is basically for those of you that don't know, it's a large wheel that is spun.
00:25:51
Speaker
and uh there are like sections of the wheel that are colored black or red and they alternate going all the way around the wheel and they have different numbers on them and people will gamble on you can gamble on black or red you can gamble on a specific number i mean all this sort of stuff that you can you can do to make your bets on on what a ball that is dropped then onto this wheel
00:26:18
Speaker
will land on so if it lands on black and you bet on black you get you win if it lands on 26 and you bet on 26 you win um but you know this is pretty much a completely random set of events again like it's one of those it's one of these games that we're talking about or one of these situations that is like a
00:26:41
Speaker
a highly contained perfect randomness and on this date in 1913 the ball fell on black 26 times in a row and the probability of this as the Wikipedia article puts it is 18 divided by 37
00:27:01
Speaker
to the 26th power minus one or better way to put this around one in six point six I'm sorry sixty six point six million one in sixty six point million is the chances of this this is like
00:27:20
Speaker
Flipping a coin a million times, I guess 66.6 million times, and it coming up heads every single time. It's possible, it's just not likely.
00:27:33
Speaker
You know, it's one of these situations where it's just horrifically unlikely. And so, gamblers lost millions and millions of francs, the French currency at the time, betting against black because they reasoned that at a certain point it had to go back to red. It had to be red because, not even though, because it had landed on black so many times in a row.
00:27:59
Speaker
and so the reasoning is that that streak was causing an imbalance in the randomness of the wheel and so then it had to be followed by a long streak of red but that again is not understanding the fact that every time the wheel is spun it is a perfect 50-50 chance yep
00:28:18
Speaker
And so, I mean, that is, that is such a great, I love that story and I can totally imagine that scene too. But, you know, it's, it's just one of those things where you're like, yeah, well, how, how, you know, how would you have reacted in that situation? I probably would have been in the same boat. I probably would have gone, yeah, it's gotta be right at some point. Yeah. Or you'll have, or you'd, I wonder how many people made money because they're just like, well, it has to keep out of hitting black, right? You're just going to keep hitting black. Yeah. And it's.
00:28:46
Speaker
You see that in games a lot, I think. Any game with elements of randomness, they think that those statistics needed to play out. That the reason there's a 50% chance for this to happen is because it will happen 50% of the time. I was like, that's not actually how it works. That's the reverse of how it works. There's a 50% chance because it could go either way
00:29:13
Speaker
What the actual results are is not dependent on anything we do. If something truly has a 50% chance, there's no input that's going to dictate one way or the other.
Probability and Misconceptions in Elections
00:29:25
Speaker
It's just going to happen. And even if there's a 70% or 80% chance in some video games where it gives you a percentage chance to pick this lock or to hack this computer,
00:29:37
Speaker
I've seen friends get really upset when they lose an 80% and it doesn't work. And then all of a sudden they're like, well, that was an 80% chance it should have happened. It's like, well, it would happen most of the time, but there was a 20% chance you were going to fail it and you failed it. Like there was a chance you did. This happens a lot with like elections and things too. Well, the predictions say, I mean, and there's a whole host of how these predictions are built. And that's a whole other thing. But even if assuming that these are correct,
00:30:07
Speaker
If there's an 80% chance this result, 20% this, the 20% can still happen. It is still an actual possibility.
00:30:17
Speaker
Right. And that's one of those things, I mean, like think about, you know, presidential election, you know, there are, again, those are more, you know, influenced, I guess, moments where, you know, individual bias, like sort of sways one way, and especially in region to region basis.
00:30:40
Speaker
But just like in a void, the way that the US political system is set up, it tends to be a Democrat or a Republican. So it is a 50-50 chance for each person. And if you're flipping a coin, 50 or whatever, how many people we have in this country, 300 million or something, you're flipping 300 million coins at that point. You know what I mean? Like theoretically, it's gonna be somewhere in the range of
00:31:09
Speaker
Of that of that 50 percentage, but it's not going to be exactly 50 percent And one thing too is is percent chances. It's a thing that we tend to boil down to because it's a thing It's something people can relate to and they understand or at least like sometimes think they understand but have misunderstandings about it So a lot of things will get boiled down into percentages, but something like an election You don't have you
00:31:35
Speaker
You can't really build and this is 50%. This is, you know, this is an 80% chance to happen. It's based and how you come to those percentages is a lot of work that isn't always shown and isn't always understood. And I'd say it's probably not understood very often. Like a coin, we just know there's two sides to this coin, assuming the coin is properly balanced, it's 50-50. But of course, I just had an addendum there, assuming it's properly balanced. And this is why statistics is weird.
00:32:05
Speaker
Right, right, absolutely. So this is weird and so is our perception of the world, that's for darn sure. Yeah. I think there is one, the one last thing that I want to talk about in reference to the Clark clan and the gambling here a little bit is
00:32:29
Speaker
sort of the superstition and I know there's a longer episode to be had about this you know down the line but it just the way that they handle superstition and the idea that oh well you're you're born under a bad sign and so your life is going to be cursed um you know that again there's that certainty of a pattern like this this sort of causality this this determination of causality when it's
00:32:56
Speaker
more coincidence than anything else, even if there is something tragic that happens.
Superstition and Destiny Themes
00:33:01
Speaker
It just reminds me a lot of Oedipus Rex, the whole Oedipus story, where, you know, the prophecies say that the son of Thebes is going to be, you know, like, is going to have a horrible life and blah, blah, blah, and all this stuff. And yes, it pans out. But like, a lot of what happens
00:33:25
Speaker
is as a result of the actions of the people in the story. Had they never heard of that prophecy, they probably wouldn't have taken the action of getting rid of their son and casting him out to die on a mountain, and then the person who found their son wouldn't have taken him in.
00:33:48
Speaker
named him and and raised him and then you know trained him to be this great warrior and and a wise you know person who saved the town from the Sphinx and all this sort of stuff so again it's it's this whole sort of thing where there's there's a causation I mean like I don't know I guess there's a slight difference to this but there's a causation to this but it's not because of the prophecy specifically it's the the self-fulfilling prophecy right
00:34:18
Speaker
trope or cliche at this point. But that's a big storytelling convention too that you make this prediction and then the people who believe in that then make the prediction happen. And the question is, did it happen because of divine whatever where this prediction came from? Or did it happen because people made it happen? And yeah, that happens in stories a lot. And they'll go either way or they won't give an explanation.
00:34:43
Speaker
The stories that try to build the loop that ask that question I think will intentionally obfuscate what the actual causation of the events following the prophecy were, whether it was the prophecy itself or whether there was some power behind the prophecy that created it and made it happen.
00:35:02
Speaker
yeah i just i think it gets us into this that really that not not identical but similar discussion of of chance and destiny and all the sort of stuff where it's a lot of it is a a lot of our perception of predestiny and and all this sort of thing is a misunderstanding of how
00:35:24
Speaker
the world works and i think that's exactly what we run into with the gamblers fallacy too you know we just don't understand how randomness works and so we we come up with ways of trying to of trying to make sense of it and you know if if that's not a if that's not a classic goblin moment i don't know what is trying to make sense of something and completely whipping that's that's perfect for the correct plan it i'm not saying it doesn't fit and i'm not saying it doesn't fit for us but
00:35:54
Speaker
yeah trying to figure something out and and instead it explodes in your face yeah absolutely or trying to figure it out and thus it explodes see that's the question hmm was the explosion everything or was the explosion nothing or both
00:36:22
Speaker
That's our show.
Conclusion and Listener Acknowledgements
00:36:23
Speaker
You can find the podcast at goblinlorepod on Twitter or email any questions, comments, or concerns to goblinlorepodcast at gmail.com. If you'd like to support your friendly neighborhood Gobslugs, you can do so at patreon.com slash goblinlorepod.
00:36:41
Speaker
This episode of Goblin Lore was hosted by Joe Redman, who you can find on Twitter, at FinD1. That's F-Y-N-D Horn. This episode was written and co-hosted by Alex Newman, who you can find on Twitter, at AlexanderNewM. Engineering, editing, and production for this episode, also by Joe Redman.
00:36:58
Speaker
Our music is by Wintergotten, who you can find at vintergotten.com. Logo by Stephen Raphael on Twitter at StephenRaffle. Goblin lore is presented by Hipster the Coast, which you can find at hipstersthecoast.com or on Twitter at hipstersmtg. Thank you all for listening, and remember, goblins, like snowflakes, are only dangerous in numbers.