Hopefully this is a serious discussion.  Those who wish to point out my ignorance, please do it quickly and then leave.

Is there an effect with no cause?  Does the apple fall from the tree for no reason?  No, there is gravity and Nature's natural intent that the apple fall.  And the wind.  And the occasional roulette player beating his head against the trunk because he played the Martingale.  There is cause!

A definition:   something that inevitably follows an [1] antecedent (as a cause or agent)

So when we see RRRRR, is there a cause or did it just happen?  I know the first-blush cause is that random is doing his/her thing.  Does random "decide" when to do this?  Or is random as helpless against itself as we are against it?

The crux of the post:  If it could be true that random is helpless against itself, is there a way to exploit this weakness?

TwoCat

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/antecedent

Quote from: TwoCatSam on August 06, 2013, 12:43:50 PM

So when we see RRRRR, is there a cause or did it just happen?  I know the first-blush cause is that random is doing his/her thing.  Does random "decide" when to do this?  Or is random as helpless against itself as we are against it?

The crux of the post:  If it could be true that random is helpless against itself, is there a way to exploit this weakness?

TwoCat

Yeah...seems like this train of thought has been covered alot recently or maybe I am mentally sorting the posts and prioritizing...anyways...

After having just watched another installment of the "Final Destination" movies...I guess I have to think about this one in a new light...(so I will leave my final judgment I guess to some time in the future)

However....My initial thought is that exploitation of Random lies in having the bankroll, bet selection and intestinal fortitude to play out a string once you feel you have an advantage based on an advantageous standard deviation situation arising.  The trick is to be able to play out multiple "opportunities" in a manner to "win" rather than to simply survive as it seems many players do.

"Random" presents itself by deviating from the standard but if the deviation is long enough and extreme enough we have a level of certainty over the course of enough spins that if our bet selection, money management and bankroll all fall in line...should give you an advantage.  Of course, that being said...we know the first several attacks we play with that mentality most certainly has us facing RFH after RFH...but in the end if you can weather the storm...you will win and beat random at it's own game.

Of course with limited bankrolls, a limited amount of physical time you can sit at the table, combined with table limits and the drudgery of waiting for opportunites to strike (and then winning within the first few spins only to wait for another opportunity to again arise) the boredom combined with the aforementioned certainly pit human nature against random and being a betting man myself...I know where I'm putting my money on that match-up.

So I say Random has no plan to do us in and can just do her own thing at will because she needs no plan...and we will do ourselves in not because random is random but because random is relentless

Quote from: TwoCatSam on August 06, 2013, 12:43:50 PM


So when we see RRRRR, is there a cause or did it just happen?  I know the first-blush cause is that random is doing his/her thing.  Does random "decide" when to do this?  Or is random as helpless against itself as we are against it?

Sam, it seems to me that this is an example of the mind projection fallacy. As I tried to explain in the original thread, the sensible way to think about probability is as a degree of belief, not as something outside ourselves, or the long-run behaviour of objects. So to call something "random" is just an expression of our ignorance. Under those circumstances, it seems reasonable to assign equal probabilities to each number or event.

it seems that our universe really isn't like the clockwork universe we've thought it is and that the cause > effect pattern is not the only explanation  why things happen.

lately I started watching the two documentations "what the bleep do we know" and "down the rabbit hole".  there's a lot of it on youtube. I find these two extremely interesting although I freely admit that I don't understand everything they present immediately.

cheers

hans

Sam,


i think Casualty is the correct name for it.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality_(physics)

In my latest video, I play the Lw Methodology.  It "seems" there is a rhyme and reason there.  Maybe that is ignorance, too.

Bayes

I am well aware of confirmation bias.  I learned it from you!  I am also aware the mind seeks examples to prove its beliefs and overlooks those which don't.  I have read "Your Owner's Manual" many times.  Everyone should...

Turner

Thanks for that.  I always confuse causality with casualty.  (I think I'm confused now!!)

Perhaps, in the future, I should not bloviate without having thought the whole idea over a hundred times.

Thanks, all.

Sam

Thank you 2Cat : )

Quote from: TwoCatSam on August 07, 2013, 08:10:20 PM

Bayes

I am well aware of confirmation bias.  I learned it from you!  I am also aware the mind seeks examples to prove its beliefs and overlooks those which don't.  I have read "Your Owner's Manual" many times.  Everyone should...

Sam, this is a different fallacy. Unfortunately, gambling is especially fertile ground for them!

Bayes

Are you referring to this:  "real existence of imagined objects"? 

Is the Cat chasing an imaginary mouse?

How exactly does the gentleman's theories connect to my post?   Please elaborate.  I am a bit lost.

(By the way, this IS the original post.  Someone decided to mimic me.  I deleted it and Esoito resurrected it.)


Sam

Some people don't realize that everything they hear or see is first run through a set of filters.  These filters are our life experiences.  Basically, we see and hear exactly what we want to see and hear.  Personally I find it hard to admit President Obama has ever said or done anything worthwhile because I loathe the man.  My filters make it hard to see any good in him.  So I set them aside--sometimes--and admit:  Yes, that was a good idea.

One book I read said it this way:  Don't just look at a thing; look at the lenses through which you are looking at the thing.   Hard to do!!

Read if you wish:

Twocats,

Since we live in a physical world everything has cause and effect, only sometimes it is hard to see logic in something happening and the boundaries are unclear. It becomes too trivial to acknowledge the cause since we are only really interested in the effect, the actual thing that affects us physically or mentally. In other cases the consequence is just too shocking to be able to comprehend anything else. Then also certain factors might conspire to lead to a unique scenario which causes some consequence that is simply impossible to understand; that consequence in turn becomes a cause of another effect and so on. At this point people start saying "Everything happens for a reason", as oppose to "This happened for that reason". This is the human mind unable to process enough information to see logic in apparent chaos; things then get dumbed down to an acceptable but vague terminology, most of which cannot be clearly defined.

There is a problem with your example of RRRRR. We know each outcome is independent, and there is only one wheel, one track and one ball that can land in one pocket. Thus you have not really experienced RRRRR, but rather 5 x R, by coincidence at that point, sequentially. Are they different? Well one example considers RRRRR as somthing that just happens. 5 x R defines five individual causes and effects. Mathematically with the player at a disadvantage it's impossible to win. On paper the game is beatable through the use of progressions. In reality, that is still not actually the case.  Any bet selection that does not consider extraneous variables is really just a system, even if it doesn't have concrete rules, and in the end they are all defeated by fluctuation. My opinion, it is not worth understanding randomness in this game but time is better suited to discovering some bet selection(s) with a low enough variance to allow the safe use of progressions. I am talking about a bet with long periods of dominant wins and short periods of losses. Against the random game that is the real holy grail.

Thank you, Number Six.  I'll study that carefully.

Quote from: Number Six on August 09, 2013, 09:55:13 AM
My opinion, it is not worth understanding randomness in this game but time is better suited to discovering some bet selection(s) with a low enough variance to allow the safe use of progressions.

Talking of low variances I often hear differing opinions about a particular kind of bet selection. This is the "when" part of the bet selection. One technique in the "when" part is counting for virtual losses and then start betting. Do you think that will lower the variance?
One arm of this forum seems to advocate this kind of selection. For example, the post from BW recently named "Whiz supper" and Spin4fun's tweak on Speedy Gonzales they talk about waiting for a certain number of virtual losses before betting on it. Not only them, even some books I read advocate this kind of betting. For eg the Brett Morton book I read, it talks about waiting for atleast 6 spins (or in other words 1-5 virtual losses depending on the pattern you are observing) before betting against the wheel.

Other arm of this forum seems to think otherwise. I read Superman's signature which said, "If someone says wait for 2 virtual losses etc when defining the system, that system is stuff". 

Really would like to understand views on whether such a thing is going to lower the variance. One side of me tells yes, and other side tells it is an useless effort.

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@ Archie,

QuoteIf you can't alter the mean, then what of the variance.

You can have a distribution with identical means but different variances. Here's a simple example:


{1,2,3,4,5} and {3,3,3,3,3} both have mean 3, but the first set has positive variance, while in the second the variance is zero.


And it depends on the application you have in mind whether the variance is secondary to the mean.

QuoteMore (real) gains, entertainment included, have been made with quantum mechanics than will ever derive from roulette. And even then, it remains random.

Quantum mechanics isn't random, it's deterministic and accurate to 10 decimal places. It may be weird and not well understood but that doesn't mean it's random. The Copenhagen interpretation is just that - an interpretation (there are others which don't entail the assumption that QM is inherently random). It's another example of the mind-projection fallacy.