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Episode 95: Who has Two Thumbs? Not Krark (pt 1)
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Hello, Podwalkers, and welcome back to the Goblin Lore Podcast!
Back in our forty-ninth episode, Alex and Joe discussed a goblin character that we had not physically seen yet in Magic: the Gathering lore – Krark, of the Mirrodin goblins – and the clan he founded and inspired. This episode looked at the Gambler's Fallacy in the real world! Hobbes had been unable to join and was particularly upset as Krark is very dear to him.
So let's return to this topic now that we know a little more about Krark. We also have a friend who has been on the show before and BEGGED to come back we swear (Orcish Librarian). Learn why we all suck at identify randomness and stick around for Hobbes's wild theories on the development of Krark as it relates to a famous Mathematician who flipped a lot of coins.
Again we would like to state that Black Lives Matter (with a link to where you can offer support both monetary and not).
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As promised, we plan to keep these Mental Health Links available moving forward too. For general Mental Health the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) has great resources for people struggling with mental health concerns as well as their families. We also want to draw attention to this article on stigma from NAMI's site.
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You can find the hosts on Twitter: Hobbes Q. at @HobbesQ, and Alex Newman at @Mel_Chronicler. 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).
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:31
Speaker
Hello, Podwalkers, and welcome to another episode of the Goblin Lore podcast. Today, we want to revisit a topic we covered in the past, Quark and the Gambler's Felacy. Our previous episode on that was number 49, which was posted over a year ago in August of last year. Let's get to our opening question and our introductions. Let's start by introducing a returning guest who we're very excited to talk to again. Marcus, would you like to introduce yourself?
00:00:58
Speaker
Since you asked so nicely, yes, I'm a orcish librarian or people who know me through the tweeters may know me as bibliovore orc, because that's where I tend to clutter up people's experiences. It's been alleged, but it's never been proven. Zero convictions, as it says on my dating profile. So we're
00:01:23
Speaker
I'm not going to give any more credence to those rumors. Yeah, you don't want to slip up this early in the captioning to anything. No, and I know this is being recorded too, so I have to be very careful about what I say, lest it come back at me in an evidentiary manner later. Yeah, I mean, I know when we had Gavin on, we were worried that he might slip, but you know this would be even bigger than that. There are already enough libraries that I'm not allowed into anymore that I don't want to.
00:01:52
Speaker
I don't want to have to move again. So
Favorite Coin Flip Cards Discussion
00:01:59
Speaker
welcome back. And we have a question for you for today. It is what is your favorite coin flip card?
00:02:05
Speaker
Okay, I had to think hard about this and I'm tempted to sort of cheat because I'm going to tell you the two that I almost picked. I almost picked Chance Encounter. This is like how Alex answers every single question. Awesome. So I almost picked Chance Encounter, which is the red enchantment that gives you the alternate win condition if you can win enough coin flips.
00:02:29
Speaker
because i'm a sucker for build around cards and i'm a sucker for alternate when conditions so that that is essentially laser targeted at my interests but i figure most people probably already no chance encounter so i decided to pass on that i almost picked a goblin festival. I have to be topical about which is one of my sort of like.
00:02:48
Speaker
Sneaky weird edh cards that i think people don't know about that i like to bring up every now and again and goblin festival is another red enchantment in this case let you spend two colorless and flip a coin. To deal one damage to any target and if you lose the flip you have to give control of goblin festival to an opponent.
00:03:09
Speaker
So it's chaotic enough to begin with but it gets even more chaotic when you realize that you can stack as many of those coin flips as you have managed to pay with and it doesn't matter if in the process of resolving those flips you lose control of the enchantment you hand it over and then keep resolving all the flips there on the stack so you can create very chaotic board situations if you have a lot of people with spare mana and a desire to see the world burn.
00:03:34
Speaker
But the card I settled on. And Flavorfully Fits Goblin Festival, like that really? Yeah, and the flavor text says, what are we celebrating again? And the answer is, doesn't matter. So yeah, and that's some great art on that too. Is that Jeff Loebenstein? I believe so, yes. It is, yeah. But the card I landed on, which I'm going to pick, is Crooked Scales.
00:04:01
Speaker
which is an artifact from Mercadian masks, which was kind of the point in my life when I was playing the most magic, was doing masks, triple drafts, twice a week. So I really timed my magic poorly in terms of building a valuable card collection. If you have foils for masks, you could have been in good shape. No, but I have an entire box full of stinging barriers that I happily first picked.
00:04:27
Speaker
which unfortunately did not appreciate in value. But Cricut Scales is an artifact for four color lists that you can pay for and tap. Choose target creature you control and target creature and opponent controls. Flip a coin. If you win the flip, destroy the creature that the opponent controls. If you lose the flip, destroy the creature that you control unless you pay three mana and re-flip the coin.
00:04:48
Speaker
And the art shows a pair of scales and one side on the right side, the person holding that right side of the scale has their finger on the pan to sort of cheat the balance. And so to me, I love the flavor on this card and
00:05:06
Speaker
It's a mask era card that fits with the corrupt mercantile government that happened in Mass Block, but it also has a very Orzhov feel to it. I love the idea that you could reprint this in a Ravnica set as an Orzhov card and put some Orzhov flavor on that too.
00:05:23
Speaker
Awesome. Uh, Alex, do you want to go next? Um, sure. I'm Alex found on Twitter at Alexander. I'm listening old cask. Got my old Twitter on Twitter at Mel underscore chronicler. Um, and
00:05:40
Speaker
So I think I'm just going to take what I consider the low-hanging fruit, which isn't always, but I'm going to say Squeeze Revenge because it's just one of the best examples of Squeeze Superpower, as I like to call it, being underestimated. And this is when he kills, was this Ertai by accident?
00:06:05
Speaker
Like corrupted, perexinized, corrupted Ertai. I just love it. And the art is just amazing because the look on Squee's face is panicked as he's like accidentally causing an entire avalanche of debris to fall onto Ertai who has no idea it's coming. Squee basically has two facial expressions. He has happy, like when he's holding, you know, the Squee's toy and then he has panic to like in Crumbling Sanctuary and this card.
00:06:36
Speaker
Oh, and sad in his body lying in front of, you know, Crovax and stuff. That's also fun, too. Poor Squeak. I suppose I could say what the card actually does, too. Oh, yeah. It's just one red blue for a sorcery. Choose a number. Flip a coin that many times or until you lose whichever comes first. If you win all the flips, draw two cards for each flip. So
00:07:05
Speaker
For me, so I'm HobbsQ, he him, I can be found on Twitter at HobbsQ. And I had a really difficult time with this question. I am actually in the process of rebuilding a coin flip deck. And especially now that Kark the Thumbless is out, who we're sure we're going to talk about today, when that card got spoiled, I was just like, well, I guess that coin flip wheels deck that I was building with just like Niv Mizzet or somebody random is now going to become Kark and Sakashima.
00:07:33
Speaker
Because the universe just drops a news peg into your lap it was it was beautiful and when sakashima got spoiled on top of it and i realized that i could try to build mechanized production kark's thumb just just to add it in and just see how many thumbs i could actually give kark because of the gambling
00:07:51
Speaker
He's all thumbs. He's all thumbs. He's thumbless, but he's all thumbs. So I had a difficult time because I love coin flip cards. I always have. I loved kind of trying to cheat.
00:08:04
Speaker
the randomness, which is why Karchstam is a cool card. But I settled on fiery gambit because when I had my original coin flip deck, fiery gambit was always just, it was really just a fun card because you would try to copy it, obviously, multiple times. So if people don't know fiery gambit is from Mirrodin, it is a sorcery that you flip a coin until you lose a flip or choose to stop flipping.
00:08:31
Speaker
If you lose, no effect. But if you win one or more, you deal three damage to a creature. If you win two or more, six to each opponent. If you win three or more, draw nine cards and uncap all the lands you control. I feel like there's an unwritten line of rules text on all of these coin flip cards to that say, you know, until someone chooses to stop, which is don't choose to stop. Right. Like why are you if you're playing this, you've you are already ride or die on coin flips like.
00:09:01
Speaker
Just yeah, well if you have a chance to counter out right, you know, like go for it Yeah, you're trying to just you're just trying to get that I mean that that's why it was great when they took like frenetic afreet so that you could Stack those again So but like I at least that I really was close to choosing boom pile and that was actually more to do with the flavor text on it and
00:09:25
Speaker
So Boompile is flip a coin if you win the flip, destroy all nonland permanents. It's an artifact for four. And it fuses. We have more than enough. Now, which one was it? Fleer in one eye goblin engineer. So also just pretty appropriate for this cast in general. And I would say that there are a fair number of goblin or goblin related cards that go with coin flipping.
Revisiting Quark in Commander Legends
00:09:49
Speaker
And I think that it makes a lot of sense.
00:09:52
Speaker
So we're coming off of doing our Commander Legends episodes. We just got Kark kind of handed to us with a little bit more story than we ever had. And it's a great time to kind of revisit a topic, Alex, that you and Joe did when I couldn't be there. Yeah.
00:10:14
Speaker
Yeah, it's so glad and thank you, Orcish, because you reached out to us to do this episode and it was some really good timing because we've been talking about this for a little while and then Quark came out a week, two weeks before we decided to record this. Like a sign from On High or from Renton, Washington is the case maybe.
00:10:37
Speaker
Yeah, so just that is really cool. I do want to just quickly say, you know, talk about revisiting topics, because now that the cast is about two years old, we're starting to kind of come back to some of the things we've talked about before. And this is, you know, when we find a topic like this, especially this is one where we can bring, you know, both Hobbs and you, Orcish, to talk about this thing, that to bring new perspectives to it.
00:11:03
Speaker
it, which is great. And there's more to talk about, we have more story for Quark, we have a card for Quark. But also, like there are topics that are just good to revisit every so often. And so I think this is a thing that will start to happen. I mean, we've got plenty of other new, new things to hit. But I think as time goes on, we're going to be revisiting topics as we find good times and, and reasons to come back.
00:11:30
Speaker
So with that, do you want to start talking about Quark? Because I know Orcish, because Hobbs and I got a chance to talk about it in our last episode about Commander Legends. Yeah, so I mean, for people who aren't familiar with Quark, a character who previously was known only for his thumbs, which at the time that they were introduced to us were no longer attached to the rest of him,
00:11:58
Speaker
And so first we got Krak's thumb and then we got Krak's other thumb. And so now finally we have Krak the thumbless. And the story brief that came out for Krak with Commander Legends tells us that he was a high-rolling gambler who lived in the Occident Mountains of Muradin who lost both of his thumbs betting on a Hellion race, including his luckiest thumb.
00:12:24
Speaker
And I love multiple things about that. We're two sentences in and I love multiple things about this already. The first of which being that it implies that Kark already had a thumb which he considered to be luckier than the other thumb. It doesn't tell us which of the thumbs it was, but apparently he had not just a lucky thumb, but a luckier thumb.
00:12:43
Speaker
And I feel like we already get a sense for Krak, which is that he is what probably in today's modern earth society, we would consider a problem gambler in the sense that he appears to be making wagers that he can't afford to lose. So really, how much we should be laughing at him, I guess is open to question. He could use some help.
00:13:07
Speaker
uh but crark lost both his stuff unfortunately i gotta say i think you're assuming he doesn't have other thumbs i've already contended that on multiple times this is my latest conspiracy is that he had the thumb he could make that bet
00:13:21
Speaker
Well, and so, yeah, so this is the story that we get, is that Krak then, after losing both of his thumbs betting on the Hellion race, bets Derg a thumb that he can walk to the center of Mirrodin and back, and when Derg points out that Krak doesn't have any thumbs left, Krak tells him that he's good for it.
00:13:39
Speaker
And Durg apparently takes him on his word for this. See? I guess Kark didn't say it was his thumb that he had at that point, I guess. So it certainly lends some credence to your theory that he, at the very least, had a reputation as a guy who could get a thumb. Because the person to whom he's already lost all of these bets is willing to take his word that he's good for another thumb, despite clearly being thumbless at this point.
Gambling and Decision-Making Theories
00:14:09
Speaker
See, and I just, this poses all sorts of questions about goblin bookie society on this plane too, about why thumbs are a particular state that you put down on beds. I really appreciate the nod to the onsets there. Yeah. And it raises as many questions as it answers, which I always appreciate. And given that flavor text,
00:14:33
Speaker
Is one of my obsessions. I have to call out the wonderful flavor text on on karik the thumbless which just says double or nothing So we we mentioned a little bit uh when we did this on our commander legends is that this is great too because it's a nod to the Unsets to silver bordered world. Yeah, so it's kind of cool that they pulled it together. So It makes me think of uh
00:14:57
Speaker
the lion in like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan, where he says, if you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose. Yeah. And that's that's clearly where Craig finds himself. And it, you know, to sort of preview a topic, which hopefully we'll come back to you later. It reminds me of a classic gambling for resurrection situation. In this case, try to get your thumbs back after you've already lost all your thumbs. I mean, he did end up getting his thumb back.
00:15:24
Speaker
Yeah, so just briefly, gambling for resurrection is a phenomena of human behavior, which was described as part of prospect theory, which is sort of the network of heuristics and theories that Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky described based on their studies of human behavior and human decision-making behavior.
00:15:50
Speaker
And without going too deeply into that, that's something that for anybody who's interested in human behavior, in decision-making, or really just sort of the human experience, that's a subject that repays study. And so I always recommended people, Daniel Kahneman's book, which is called Thinking Fast and Slow, and was kind of a crossover hit in the business book community and whatnot a couple of years ago. Michael Lewis's book, The Undoing Project, is sort of a history of Kahneman and Tversky's work.
00:16:19
Speaker
But prospect theory deals with how human beings make decisions under conditions of uncertainty and sort of the ways in which human behavior occasionally deviates from what economists would call rational utility maximizing behavior. And two of the sort of big points that undergird most of prospect theory are the notions that losses loom larger than gains.
00:16:44
Speaker
As human beings we hate losing something more than we like getting an equivalent amount losses hurt us more than gains make us happy. And the other piece of that is that the marginal impact of any loss or gain diminishes the further out you get away from our starting conditions so if i win a thousand dollars. That's worth more to me psychologically than if i win a second thousand dollars and so if you combine these two.
00:17:12
Speaker
Sort of functions of human decision making you you run into a phenomenon which kind of in a diversity called. Gambling for resurrection which is that if you start losing. You know you can imagine this literally as a gambling game but this applies to all you know aspects of human behavior if you start losing and you find yourself in that domain of losses as they would call it. The any future losses that you might suffer as a consequence of continuing to take increasingly long chances and losing.
00:17:39
Speaker
loom less large than the losses that you've already suffered and the prospect of somehow making good on those losses. And so you observe this behavior in people that once they find that they start losing, they'll start taking increasingly long gambles and increasingly desperate risks in an effort to get back what they've already lost. So you have this concept of gambling for resurrection. Yeah, you start chasing the money. You know, it's like if you're sitting at the blackjack table, and you've lost, you know, four or five hands in a row, you start betting more.
00:18:08
Speaker
Yeah, every casino in the world you'll observe this behavior and and it you know we do this in all aspects of our lives like you can think of you know imagine being in a relationship which is you know a Unhealthy relationship but the lengths to which people will go to to somehow try to turn that relationship around despite the fact that it's not working for them You can look this happens all the time in warfare
00:18:33
Speaker
You can look at the battle of the bulge in the final German offensive in World War 2 as an example of gambling for resurrection, taking a desperate chance that was not likely to succeed in an effort to somehow reverse all the gains that the opposing side had made to that point. For people who have seen the James Bond movie, Casino Royale,
00:18:54
Speaker
There's a scene early in that movie where James Bond is playing poker with one of the, not the final villain, but one of the early villains in the movie. And the villain has been losing at poker, and finally he bets the keys to his car. His beautiful Aston Martin, this beautiful car, he bets the keys to his car on a poker hand in an attempt to try to win back the money that he's already lost. And if you stop and think about it, there's no chance that he's ever gonna bet his car on the first hand of that game. It's in risk, you wouldn't do it.
00:19:23
Speaker
But he's so deep in the hole at that point that he's in that gambling for resurrection mode. And he's going to take this really outrageous risk in an attempt to get back what he's already lost. And so I kind of see that here with Kark. Just taking these increasingly desperate gambles to try to get back his thumbs. Well, this is the thing we see in fiction a lot too. Like any casino movie, any heist movie, or maybe not any, but a lot of those you'll see this trope. Yeah.
00:19:53
Speaker
You're in you're in too deep. You have to do just one more. Yeah, that's related to this don't cost fallacy then it sounds like Just I mean with and with Kirk we see like he literally ends up going on a journey to prove this Wild theory because he wants back his lucky thumb. Yeah
00:20:12
Speaker
And it pays off for him, but it doesn't make it a behavior that I would think the rest of us would want to model if we can avoid it. Well, what's funny is it pays off for him in the short term, and then he basically gets killed for being a heretic.
00:20:28
Speaker
He gets back that lucky thumb, but then you're like the line in the Commander Legends is basically like it was short lived. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, oddly enough, that kind of takes us to the point where we're talking about that. So do we have more we want to talk about in the story of Quark and this thing? Otherwise that seems like what would have been a nice seamless transition that I've now stomped all over.
00:20:53
Speaker
Let's just move on then. We can go back to Clark if we need to. I like the idea that a kind of cult forms in his memory. Because there's a very sort of Las Vegas-y feel to this. You can absolutely imagine this cult based around the guy who got really, really lucky. Except for the part where he didn't. But that's not the part people remember. Now I'm even more upset about the Phyrexian invasion. We could have had Quirk-inspired Las Vegas on Mirrodin.
00:21:23
Speaker
It wasn't for those darned phyrexians. So back in 2019 at Magic Fest Las Vegas, Carolyn Arnold, who's a wonderful cosplayer, did her Jace
00:21:40
Speaker
Jelves Presley cosplay, or Jace Elvis cosplay, to kind of put a Las Vegas spin on some of the planeswalkers. And it's a fantastic cosplay, and people should absolutely check it out. And we were talking about this beforehand, and I joked that the next obvious step was to do a Carne Liberace. So there's still a chance to get that, even despite, or in this case, because of the Phyrexian invasion, you could still get that Las Vegas crossover there on Mirrodin.
00:22:09
Speaker
Well, who knows? At that point, then maybe Kark does have a cult around him. You know what? But now that I think about it, though, the handful of freemirans are taking shelter with Urabrasque, the red phyrexian praetor.
Magic's Red Ability and Probability Misconceptions
00:22:25
Speaker
So maybe they will establish, you know, Las Vegas in exile. And coin flipping in magic has been almost exclusively colored and flavored as a red ability. I was actually looking this up the other day in preparation for the show.
00:22:38
Speaker
Add of the there's fifty eight cards in black border magic that's a flip a coin on them and eleven of them are colorless and forty five of excuse me. Getting the numbers wrong in my head but the point is it like they're only two. A coin flip cards that aren't either colorless or have read in their color identity it's been flavored as a very red ability.
00:23:03
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, and it makes sense that even in the silver-bordered world, we get kind of dice rolling because that was more of a mechanic that they used for starting even with unglued, but you know, we have like goblin tutor is rolling a dice and to get an effect and there's goblin bookie.
00:23:20
Speaker
you know there's a lot of even outside of the blackboard world this is really a red ability the randomness yeah well it's related to sort of the awesome yeah exactly it fits with the chaos stuff red I mean red reds Queen essential tutor is just called gamble yeah
00:23:40
Speaker
That's a very good point. So yeah, so we wanted to talk a little bit about, so like I said, Alex and Joe previously talked about the gambler's fallacy. And at least I was not able to kind of be on that episode and then Orcish approached us because he had kind of heard that episode and kind of had some thoughts on it and kind of wanted to expand a little bit. And now that we've had this more information on Kark, I actually think it fits even better.
00:24:09
Speaker
I was a polite way of saying that I wanted to nerd about this for several hours. That was a really polite way to introduce it. Yeah, I'm trying to be polite because you are a guest. You should see how poorly we treat people like Chase when they're actually a host at this point. You don't want to get to that status. So do you want to talk a little bit about just orchestra, kind of like what the gambler's fallacy is?
00:24:35
Speaker
And I'll describe the gambler's fallacy. I'll try to do it kind of non-technically. The gambler's fallacy is the notion that the outcome of future random events is influenced by the outcome of previous random events. And so the classic example of this is imagine that you're flipping a coin and you flip a coin five times and it comes up heads five times in a row.
00:25:01
Speaker
and you're sitting there thinking to yourself, well, what are the odds of that? And maybe even sit down and you do a little math and you realize that it's, you know, one in 32 are the chances of flipping a coin and having it come up heads five times in a row. And so you think to yourself, well, obviously the next flip has got to be tails. Obviously it's got to be tails. We've had too many heads in a row, it has to be tails. Or at the very least you think you have, even if you don't think it, you have this feeling that the next flip is more likely to be a tails
00:25:27
Speaker
because you understand at a basic level, the idea that a coin flip should come up to heads and tails roughly 50% of the time for each. And so since we've had so many heads, something in the universe has to happen to balance this out. And so therefore it is more likely next that we're going to get a tails.
00:25:47
Speaker
And we'll see that, so again, going back to, casinos are wonderful examples for all of this because casinos are essentially probability engines that are designed to take advantage of human misperceptions about probability and statistics in order to extract money. And so anyone who's been to, if you've been to Magic Fest Las Vegas, if you've been to one of the casinos there, you'll have noticed that in a fairly new innovation, I'm probably 10, 20 years old at this point, but in the realm of casino gambling, a fairly new innovation,
00:26:17
Speaker
Roulette tables will have an LED display next to the table now that shows the last series of numbers which have come up on the wheel. Oh, wow. Yeah, so there'll be a screen there that you can see the number. That's incredible. And the reason that they put that up there is because it preys on the gambler's fallacy that if I'm walking past the roulette table and I see that the last four spins have all been black,
00:26:43
Speaker
There's that little instinct in my lizard brain that goes, well, it's got to be read next. And they've found that displaying this information increases the amount that people will bet on roulette. And that's why those LED panels are there. Casinos are not charities. They wouldn't be putting those LED panels up if they weren't making the money.
00:27:00
Speaker
Yeah, and it's just a side thing about roulette that I think is fascinating because I don't know when I was young, I used to just watch travel channel things and they talked about that one does. One of the things I talk about relatively new. This was probably 100 years ago at this point, but the green circles, this
00:27:22
Speaker
Yeah, adding zero and double zero. They added those two because otherwise black and red was a perfect 50-50 bet and the house needs to make sure that it's never a perfect 50-50 bet for them. Yeah, it's basically the idea that they don't need to have a huge advantage for it to be profitable. They can just grind out a very small advantage over time because that is
00:27:47
Speaker
The idea of the probability. It's the economy of scales in essence. They know enough people are going to come through and put enough money down that they will make out eventually. And it brings us to the other piece here, which is super important in understanding the gamblers fallacy, which is what statisticians call the law of large numbers, which is the idea that as you increase a sample size, so imagine you're flipping a coin again.
00:28:14
Speaker
In a small sample, which in the case of a coin flip could be dozens, even hundreds of flips, we're going to always see random variation.
00:28:24
Speaker
you'll get runs of a bunch of heads in a row, a bunch of tails in a row. But if you keep flipping that coin, the larger that sample size gets, the universe doesn't actively correct out previous irregularities. But what happens is that over time, the law of large numbers prevails, and the average result for that coin converges asymptotically on the expected outcome. So over time,
00:28:48
Speaker
the average result will converge towards fifty percent for one for heads fifty percent for tails that's what the law of large numbers tells us and. The reason that the gamblers fallacy is sort of so insidious and so wired into our brains. Is that we understand the piece of probability that says the question come up heads fifty percent of the time we get that. And that's what we think about but what we're miss is that the way that operates with the law of large numbers is not that if i get ten heads at the beginning.
00:29:19
Speaker
There's no force in the universe that says, OK, well, you need to get 10 more tails later so that it evens out to 50-50. The coin doesn't have memory. And that's kind of the easiest way to sort of correct myself, I find, about the gambler's fallacy is to remember. A coin doesn't have a memory. A die doesn't have a memory. The coin has no idea what the previous flip was, and it's not trying to fix previous flips. The reason that the law of large numbers prevails is that over time, those blips get overwhelmed by the rest of the sample.
00:29:47
Speaker
It's not that they're ever canceled out actively. It's just that they disappear into the data. Yeah, and this is the whole concept behind statistics is we're not trying to look at, you know, this is why it becomes difficult if you're looking at rare phenomenon or you're looking at things that have very small sample sizes. So one thing I can talk about just from a psychology standpoint is trying to predict something like suicide or violence is very difficult to do because
00:30:14
Speaker
the actual amount of events where you would have data on is not really at a high enough power that you can make any predictive ability. You don't have kind of enough because you're really you need that that law of large numbers to be able to find patterns that are actually meaningful. I mean, in the
00:30:33
Speaker
really boring, mundane example of kind of talking about this in numbers. Like I used to, not the position I'm in now, but several years ago, I used to work in the supply department at my job and I did all the inventory management for kind of one half of our line, our business. And
00:30:54
Speaker
In order to save because we would order applications and we had brochures and different pieces, they kept trying to have us order smaller and smaller windows of inventory. But I had to try to explain to them 30 days worth of inventory is a small enough window that random variation is going to make sure that I never get an accurate count and trying to explain that to people.
00:31:20
Speaker
didn't, they never quite sunk through. And so I just always ordered six weeks worth and didn't tell them and didn't run out of stuff. I mean, as humans, we're prisoners of our own experiences. And in a very real way, the human experience is a sequence of small samples. And that that's the world that we live in. And that's our frame for reference. And I kind of want to take a second to give a shout out to an obscure historical figure who
00:31:49
Speaker
comes up in this subject, who is a mathematician named John Edmund Carrick, who is a British mathematician from South Africa, who was in Copenhagen in 1940, when the Nazis invaded Denmark. And because he was a mathematician, he ended up being interned for the rest of World War II. And what he decided to use his time to do while he was in this internment camp,
00:32:17
Speaker
was he conducted empirical experiments on probability. And what are the things he did while he was in his internment camp was he flipped a coin 10,000 times and recorded all the outcomes of the coin flips. I mean, that's got some, you know, like give you something to focus on your internment. I mean, like that. Yeah.
00:32:40
Speaker
And so essentially, he was like, what am I going to do with my time? I'm going to test the law of large numbers. And so he flipped a coin 10,000 times. And he wrote a book about this. We have his data. And we can tell you that he flipped a coin 10,000 times, and he got 5,067 heads out of his 10,000 flips, which puts him close to 50-50. It puts him just about one standard deviation away from the mean.
00:33:07
Speaker
acceptable within kind of what you look at for a normal curve. You don't talk about rare events or things being, I mean, this is why we set things that when we're trying to make cutoffs, we're usually looking at two and a half standard deviations or more. I mean, you're really trying to make sure things are out on the tail end of a curve.
00:33:27
Speaker
And in an example of what I consider gross overachieving, he then made a biased coin. They took a piece of wood and they put lead on one side so that the weight wasn't evenly distributed. And he flipped his biased coin and proved that asymptotically, the percentage on that coin converged at about 70% in favor of the biased side.
00:33:50
Speaker
So I what you I heard you said because you gave us his name John and mid Carrick Carrick Clark You're saying that he was the inspiration. Oh, wow. Okay, so That's what you're saying. If that was true. We're putting out the universe. I'm doing you can't see that I'm doing the chef's kiss thing but even if it's not true if like Gavin wanted to just pretend that it was I would accept that and I wouldn't ask questions about
00:34:16
Speaker
So Gavin, if you're hearing this, we're okay with this being canon at this point. I would not be like, show me the paper trail for this. I would just take it and run with it. Well, and so this leads us into kind of talking about this idea that. So where I kind of when I wasn't able to be on last time, one of the things that I really wanted to talk about was this idea of kind of.
00:34:41
Speaker
Humans wanting to find patterns, you mean you want to kind of explain. I mean, that's just how brains work. You're trying to explain the data that you're getting and.
00:34:51
Speaker
When you're dealing with small sample sizes, your brain doesn't care about that. It's trying to find some sort of connection. It is literally trying to understand the world. I mean, this is even going back to the idea of kind of the, there's some stuff with the neuroscience of like humans acting under like Bayesian principles. So wanting a normal curve. And there is this idea that you're trying to make.
00:35:16
Speaker
pattern you're trying to find it and so even when it's not there like you said the idea of I Like the one you talked about the five coin flips in a row and what's the odd of the next one coming up heads It's it's one out of two because it is a silly singular event Yes, it is rare to come up six in a row and that's where you can look at kind of well How likely was that to happen? But you can't do that until after the sixth coin is flipped and the next one is still one out of two and
00:35:43
Speaker
So I'm going to jump ahead just a little bit in our show notes, because I think that's a good spot to talk about something I want to bring from the last episode, which Joe brought up that I hadn't heard of. But this was a talking about randomness and talking about the Gambler's Fallacy. And this, I think, historically was one of the first places where people like really examined it was at 1913 at the Monte Carlo Casino, where a roulette ball fell on black 26 times in a row.
00:36:13
Speaker
Yeah. And because of that, like you had this this whole stretch, and I, I'd be curious, I should see if I this is something I really kind of want to research a little more myself. But at some point, like, people started betting on red, because, you know, lost millions and millions of francs betting on red, because they assume like, it has to be read at some point, it has to be read. Yeah.
00:36:38
Speaker
I mean, and eventually it was, or the 27th roll would have been not black, but still these, every single roll had the same odds, but that's not how people saw it because they were building that history. Yep. And to sort of borrow a phrase from finance, the problem at the end of the day is that the market can stay irrational for longer than the gambler can stay solvent.
00:37:05
Speaker
And yeah, yeah, this is the thing is that as human beings, we have an extremely skewed perception of what we think randomness looks like. We think that randomness is smooth. We think that all the events in a random series should come out at roughly the same percentage all the time. There shouldn't be big chunks. There shouldn't be big runs one way or another, when in reality, randomness is very lumpy.
00:37:35
Speaker
Because it's a rant that that's literally what randomness is you get streaks you get runs
00:37:41
Speaker
Kind of imagine like if you're looking at a smooth surface, like a polished metal surface, it looks very smooth. But if you could see that same surface under extreme magnification, like if you look at that same surface with a microscope, it's covered in bumps and ridges. And that's kind of the way we can think about randomness and the way we can think about the law of large numbers is that from the large perspective,
00:38:08
Speaker
Random events seem very smooth, but when you look at them in a small sample, you see bumps, you see dips, you see streaks and runs. There's a exercise which I know statistics professors are very fond of, and I know this because I had a statistics professor who would do this with his classes, where you can ask people to
00:38:30
Speaker
do one of two things based on a random assignment. Either flip a coin 200 times and record the outcomes of those coin flips, or pretend that you flipped a coin 200 times and write down what you think a random sequence of 200 coin flips would look like. And if you ask people to do that, you can then with very high accuracy. There's actually a paper about this that Professor wrote that you can look at. And essentially what he said is with about 85% accuracy, I can sort
00:38:58
Speaker
these outcomes into two piles. I can pick the genuine coin flips from the fake coin flips with about 85% accuracy using only one tool, which is to look at the list, look at the results and find the longest streak. Because if you actually flip a coin 200 times, the median longest streak is about seven. So you should expect more often than not that you're gonna find a streak somewhere in that data of seven heads in a row or seven tails in a row.
00:39:28
Speaker
People don't do that when they're trying to produce what they think a random outcome looks like. People seldom go more than five heads in a row or five tails in a row. Because to them, that starts to look not random. That looks like something is wrong. But that's what randomness actually looks like. It's very lumpy. And going back to John and McCarrick for a second, if anyone wants to, you can actually go on Wikipedia. You can see an excerpt of his data. They have 2,000 of his coin flips.
00:39:57
Speaker
And if you want to, you can look at that and you'll find that his longest streak in those 2000 coin flips is 12 heads in a row.
00:40:05
Speaker
There's a streak where he gets 12 heads in a row in what is, again, flipping a fair coin, which in the long run turns out to be within one standard deviation of what you would expect, 5,067 heads out of 10,000 flips.
Conclusion and Contact Information
00:40:17
Speaker
But he does have a streak in there where he gets head 12 times in a row. And the odds of, if you just sat down and flipped a coin 12 times, the odds of getting 12 heads in a row is less than one in 4,000.
00:40:29
Speaker
But those sorts of streaks will happen naturally as part of random sequences. And like Hobb said, as humans, we see those, and we want to perceive that those are non-random events. We want to read patterns in there. There's actually a term for this. It's called the clustering illusion, where we see these sorts of clusters in small random samples, and we think that they indicate that something non-random is happening.
00:40:53
Speaker
And again, for people who want to, you can go on Wikipedia, you can look up the clustering illusion, and there's actually you can watch a little animation that shows 10,000 dots being randomly placed on a grid. And even though you know that you're literally looking at an example of the clustering illusion, as those dots start to come in, you notice that you start to notice clusters. There are places where there are more dots than other places. They're not evenly distributed throughout the grid.
00:41:17
Speaker
And you start to think, well, why are there so many dots there? But that's just the way that we perceive these events. We look for patterns and we look for clusters. But the fact that they exist doesn't mean that they're non-random.
00:41:29
Speaker
And that's our show for today. You can find the host on Twitter. Hopskew can be found at Hopskew. And Alex Newman can be found at Mel Underscore. Send any questions, comments, thoughts, hopes, and dreams to at goblinmoorpod on Twitter or email us at goblinmoorpodcast at gmail.com.
00:41:47
Speaker
If you want to support your friendly neighborhood gospel, the cast can be found at patreon.com. Opening and closing music by Vindergotten, who can be found on Twitter at Vindergotten, or online at vindergotten.bandcamp.com. Logo art by Steven Raffaeo, who can be found on Twitter at SteveRaffo.
00:42:10
Speaker
Goblin Lore is proud to be presented by Hipsters of the Coast as part of their growing Vortos content as well as magic content of all kinds. Check them out on Twitter at hipstersmtg or online at hipstersofthecoast.com. Thank you all for listening and remember goblins like snowflakes are only dangerous in numbers.