Stardate 20020529.1144

(Captain's log): Superstition is rampant in Las Vegas. I suppose it was inevitable. I saw a guy at the craps table who had a rubber band around his wrist on his rolling hand, and he would stretch the rubber band and let it snap against his wrist before rolling the dice each time. There was an old man sitting in front of a slot machine who would rub his hand over the screen in front of the rollers each time as it was spinning.

It all springs ultimately from Skinnerian conditioning. Skinnerian logic goes back a long way in evolutionary history. It's a cheap substitute for real reasoning and understanding. In the real world, sometimes what you do affects the result and sometimes it doesn't. Skinnerian logic assumes that it always does, so if you do something and get a positive outcome, then do it again. Never mind why that might be, just try it.

And indeed, a lot of the time this is a reasonable thing to do. Shake a tree, and edible fruit falls onto the ground. Maybe if we shake it again we'll get more fruit. (Indeed, we probably will.)

The advantage of Skinnerian logic is that the compute load is low and it can be implemented with a relatively primitive neural net. As long as you're not concerned with trying to explain correlations, it's relatively straightforward to notice correlations and to try to take advantage of them.

Humans have sufficiently sophisticated neural systems to be able to move beyond Skinnerian logic; we rely instead on true comprehension and explanation. But we have inherited Skinnerian logic from our less sophisticated ancestors, and it's still in there.

So some old man rubbed the screen of the slot machine once and hit big; now he does it every time in hopes that it will happen again. Rubbing the screen has nothing to do with whether a given slot machine is going to pay off on any given roll, but Skinnerian logic isn't fussy.

Last night I ran into a particularly egregious example of this while playing Pai Gow Poker. At the time I just assumed that the guy was an asshole; later I realized that he was trapped by superstition.

He was betting large amounts of money, typically $200-$400 per hand. At that level, gambling becomes really serious, and losing really hurts. I, myself, never gamble with money that I'm not willing to lose. I go to Vegas with a daily budget of money I expect to leave behind. If I lose less than that, I'm pleasantly surprised. If I win, I'm very pleasantly surprised. I don't lose more than that because I stop playing when I reach my daily limit. Usually I allow about $300 per day, which is more than enough to keep me going with $10 Blackjack or $20 Pai Gow Poker. I'm actually doing very well on this trip. By this point I had expected to have lost about $1000, but I'm actually only down about $200.

On the other hand, this guy was really cranking through the black ($100) chips, and I suspect it was money he really couldn't afford to lose. He would occasionally play "banker", but when he did he wanted everyone else on the table to bet low or not at all. He also wanted the dragon hand every time, even though that's not how the dragon hand is supposed to work. It's supposed to cycle around among all the players. His grand plan was that when it was my turn to play the dragon, I'd give it to him and also give him my bet, and he'd include it with his bet. If he won, he'd pay me my share out of his winnings. I don't think so.

Whenever he picked up a hand, he would sloooowly spread it open, taking more than 20 seconds before fully exposing the cards. He had other mannerisms, too. I eventually got fed up and moved to a different table, being tired of having him trying to tell me how much money I was allowed to bet and all the other ways he was trying to interfere with my ability to play. And later in my room I spent some time fuming and making up fantasies of telling him off. (A great psychological comfort is the ability to imagine telling people things you could never do in real life. I have a very vivid imagination.)

But then I realized that he was trapped. One time he played banker and hit big. Now he plays banker again in hopes it will happen again. But he can't really afford to cover everyone else's bet, so he tries to convince them to not play when he's banker (which defeats the purpose). He wants the dragon hand every time because he's convinced himself it increases his chance of winning, because it happened once or twice. He opens his hand slowly because once when he did that he found a really good hand.

He is badly in need of a good course of study in statistics and logic and probability theory, which are the antidote to Skinnerian logic. Skinnerian logic is better than nothing at all, but we humans have moved beyond that to a much better system. But we have to watch ourselves, because it's still within us, waiting to mislead us.

The lessons of statistics et. al. can be distilled into two aphorisms:

Correlation does not imply causation
Lady Luck has no memory.