If you are getting on a commercial airliner, for safety’s sake, take a bomb with you…because overwhelming odds are there won’t be two guys on the same plane with a bomb.
Have you ever played a sport or a game where you may have messed up more than you have liked and felt that sooner or later it would all even out? Almost as if the universe owed some reimbursement for “screwing you over” and, in time, would make up for it? The Monte Carlo Fallacy seems a bit like Hot Hands from Basketball and Philosophy. The difference between the two is with Hot Hands, the player consecutively makes points (or whichever form of winning, I guess) from being in the zone. With the Monte Carlo theory, the player is actually losing or performing poorly. However, both outlooks have the same outcome; you will succeed (just in a “sooner-or-later” with the later.)
The theory goes against the belief that not everything happens for a reason. Probability isn’t reset or eased on depending on previous results. We often try to act as though things will look up around the time when we should have just quit the game (when it’s already too late.) People like to have hope to help ease the burden of knowing the odds are against them. If this were true, wouldn’t there be a lot more gamblers winning in casinos? As much as everyone likes to think that one day they’ll win it big, the truth is that most lose more money at casinos than is ever gained back.
Now that I think about it, this seems like karma. Or what I like to call, “the excuse for not taking action- because someone else will.” We’ve all been in a situation where someone else did something sleazy that really shouldn’t have been done at all. Maybe they stole something from you or backstabbed you. Some kind of deceit; you get the idea. And as they are COMPLETELY getting away with it, the reasoning for not taking any action (or to help put your mind at ease) is that “they will get what is coming.” They sooner or later will, but it’s not karma’s doing. The chances of a person doing these acts repeatedly is very likely, and the chances of running into someone else who won’t let it slide is even more likely. It’s not so much karma, but “someone else doing what you didn’t have the courage to do in the first place.” Or, you know, the person could be getting away with it altogether. If they do, what does that say about karma?
