For the past year I've been noticing an interesting phenomenon, the "Why can't I do that on purpose?"-effect. This usually happens when I'm just walking by my computer desk or other piece of furniture, and throw whatever object I'm holding on it, in this case, a balled up bit of tin-foil from a piece of chocolate. The ball bounces off an emptied drumstick of chicken, instead of landing on the glass desk immediately.
Fascinated, I try and hit the chicken drumstick again with the balled tin-foil, without success.
"How the hell did I do that by accident?"
There are actually a number of different things on my desk that the balled up bit of tin-foil could have hit to elicit that same reaction from me; the plastic candy wrappers around the chicken drumstick, the fork next to it, anything. However, if I try to hit the chicken drumstick, my reaction to the balled up tin-foil hitting the candy wrapper instead will be "Why didn't I hit the chicken wing?"
In other words, suppose there's a 50% of eliciting reaction A, due to there being 5 objects, for each of which there is a 10% chance of hitting them. If I hit one of them and elicit reaction A, I decrease the probability of re-eliciting reaction A to 10%, because the other 4 objects, if hit, will be disregarded.
This sounds like simple confirmation bias to me.
The number of times something interesting happens is probably much lower than the number of times something un-interesting happens. But the former are the only ones you notice, because they are interesting.
Confirmation bias is one ingredient.
The other ingredient is that you don't have a pre-defined set of "cool things". Let's say that if something has a one-in-a-thousand chance of happening, it's pretty cool when it happens. But there could be thousands of such things, even if we choose only the "meaningful" ones (the ones which can leave a psychological impression of "something special happened" on us). So even if each one of them is individually unlikely, the "set of all unlikely things" is actually pretty likely.
But... (read more)