“This distinction had never occurred to me, but it also seems to have escaped the attention of most of the economics profession, too. And it’s a finding that has great implications for the behavioural sciences, because it suggests that many supposed biases which economists wish to correct may not be biases at all – they may simply arise from the fact that **a decision which seems irrational when viewed through an ensemble perspective is rational when viewed through the correct time-series perspective, which is how real life is actually lived**; what happens on average when a thousand people do something once is not a clue to what will happen when one person does something a thousand times. In this, it seems, evolved human instinct may be a much better at statistics than modern economists. To explain this distinction using an extreme analogy, **if you offered ten people £10m to play Russian roulette once, two or three people might be interested, but no one would accept £100m to play ten times in a row**.” --- **Tags** -- [[templates]], [[quotes]], [[economics]] , [[gambler-fallacy]] , [[fooled-by-randomness]] , [[hindsight-bias]] , **Source** -- [[202407221554 - B - Alchemy]]