by Karl Denninger
Market-Ticker.org
So in Part I we talked about Mozzy a bit.
But I’d like to focus on something else I discussed in that article — the roulette wheel. It turns out that odds and probability in true games of chance, which roulette is, can teach you quite a lot about things that happen in the real world.
As I pointed out, and as anyone who has been in a casino can clearly relate to, every single wheel in a casino has a board at the head where the previous winning numbers for some number back are displayed. They do this because people believe that if 3, 4, 5 or even 10 reds come up in a row the next one is more likely to be black. They thus are drawn to that table, bet, and win or lose…… exactly as they do at every other table! Why? Because what happened before in a game of chance has no influence on what happens in the future, unless of course someone is cheating.