Friday the 13th and the Pattern Machines
It’s Friday the 13th. If you felt a tiny flicker of unease reading that, congratulations — your pattern-matching hardware is working exactly as designed. Humans are extraordinary pattern detectors. You spot faces in clouds, hear whispers in white noise, and draw causal arrows between events that merely coincide. This is not a bug. For most of your evolutionary history, the cost of seeing a tiger that wasn’t there was trivial compared to not seeing one that was. False positives kept your ancestors alive. False negatives got them eaten. ...