 The title of the last episode was the experiment. Now, in the experiment we talked about we had this wine tasting, we designed a double-blind experiment, and we talked generally about randomness. So we're going to start off today and kind of gauge your understanding of what we mean by chance. Let's discuss that as small groups. Tudors sometimes use chance and probability interchangeably, but I think that's probably not really accurate. Yeah, I guess chance is kind of just stop happening. And probability is try to measure how likely it is that stuff happens. The chance looks like something when it isn't. Whether you're actually detecting something in the sky or something, you're comparing it to nothing at all. You're comparing it to the absence of structure. Doesn't the whole Schrodinger's cat experiment fun? I like that. Well, even a coin flip, I mean, if you had a really good physicist and a lot of time, and you flipped that coin, you could count, you could compute, you could write an equation specifically for what that coin is going to come up, whether it's going to be heads or tails. I don't know how she does it. She just goes to that machine, play that machine, and play this amount, and it will win. Maybe the universe is randomness and chaos, and we're just seeing patterns. Chance and randomness are just words we use to describe things when all the external factors aren't immediately quantifiable. What causes superstitious belief? How did we go from... I walked like a black cat across my park this morning to, oh, I broke both my legs on the train later today. Like, do you say you have no superstitions? Yes. My example was people might fall down the stairs and break their legs, and they don't want to say, oh, it's because I was careless or because I'm uncoordinated. They want to blame it on the fact that they, like, opened an umbrella inside, like, on the way to work or something. You believe in things because it's a cultural thing. It's been passed down from your family, and it just becomes part of something that you can draw on. You remember those instances more than perhaps other things. So when next time you see a black cat, all these examples might come rushing to your mind. A common aspect is the pattern recognition systems. I think Gilovich talked about how, like, we have this cognitive machinery to see patterns in everyday life, which is very useful, but it's fallible in a sense. Like, it makes mistakes, and that can sort of, like, cause the creation of those superstitious beliefs.