Gambling Fallacies: Definitions

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Gambling Fallacies:
Availability error: The tendency to focus only on good, unusual, or easily remembered experiences, forgetting the bad, common, or less available ones. Hearing that someone has won the lottery sticks in our mind more than hearing that someone has lost.
Favorable events: People believe something favorable to be more likely to happen than something unfavorable, even if the mathematical odds are the same
California Lotto Jackpot: odds are approximately one in 18million. If you have to drive ten miles to buy this ticket, you are three times more likely to be killed in an automobile accident on the way than to win the jackpot, yet many people would incorrectly think that winning this lottery would be more probable.
Unusual events: …show more content…
Long shot: Overvaluing high gain, low probability wagers and undervaluing low gain, high probability wagers.
Many people prefer to play the lotto (high gain, low probability) to a fair coin toss (low gain, high probability).
Large chance: Many people prefer a single large chance to many small chances, even if the odds are equal (unless the multiple chances have a different source, in which case they are preferred).

Conjunction errors: added conditions can make a case seem more probable, despite the fact that added conditions make it inherently less probable.

Rolling a 6-sided die with 2R and 4G sides, many people incorrectly believe that the sequence GRGRRR is more likely than RGRRR.
One experiment asked people to choose the more likely of the following two statements-and 85% of them chose the first!
Linda is a bank teller and active in the feminist …show more content…
Enthymemes:

Post hoc ergo propter hoc :
For example, misattributing the regression to the mean effect: after a person has an especially good performance on a test or in some other difficult situation, s/he will normally do less well the next time-otherwise the especially good performance would have been considered "normal" and a better performance would be required for you to call it "especially good." If you happen now to praise the person for her/his great performance, and the next time s/he goes back to normal (as you'd expect) then it is easy to misattribute the drop in performance to your having praised her/him.
Be careful not to mistake "regression to the mean" for the Gambler's fallacy.
Confusing correlation with causation: assuming since two things are statistically correlated that one is the cause of the other.
One famous case is the putative milk-cancer link. Cancer is CORRELATED to milk consumption, but probably not CAUSED by drinking milk. Rather the correlation is more likely because milk drinkers live longer than milk abstainers, and people who live longer are more likely to die of cancer than those who die
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