In all kinds of prediction, a very strong trend is to use patterns from the past to predict the future.
Take technical analysis for example. They try to identify trends, patterns and waves in order to forecast the (short or long term) future. If you go to the core of the technical analysis, it says
- history teaches us some patterns of price movement
- the current situation belongs to this patterns
- thus this is how the situation will evolve
But this is not limited to technical analysis. Many roulette precognition methods are based on historical data and past experience. I know someone who claims that he knows (has identified) connections between numbers by examining many thousands of spins. After 34 comes 7 more often that any other number etc. Even AP is based on analysis of past data.
I believe human brain is hardcoded to give great importance to historic or past data and expecting that they will repeat themselves. If someone walks the road with red and nothing happens to him, he tends to believe that this is ok and will repeat it. While if someone walks with green and accidentally a car hits him, he will be afraid even when passing the street with green. In this case "history" gives false information about what may be dangerous or not and logically we know it, but our instincts, based on past facts, tell us that history will repeat itself.
The player with the bad system, who got lucky will feel extra confidence, while the guy with the good system who faced the sequence from hell will feel completely defeated. We just can't stop believing that history will repeat itself. If something happened before, it will happen again.
I was reading lately about pattern recognition and waves in roulette and I understand that all these are based on the principle of "learn from the past". And being a contrarian by nature I though "why should history repeat itself? Even if we were able to identify concrete patterns and number connections by analyzing millions of spins, why should they help us predict future results,? Why should these phenomena repeat themselves? In a random game, maybe we should take the fact that something happened in the past, as an indication that it will not happen again in the future."
And i'm talking about millions of spins. Say we analyzed 10 millions spins from various roulette tables and various casinos and found that after 34 comes 7 with a rate of 5% instead of the expected 2,7%. What would this mean to you?
Anyway my general observation is that humans take history and past, very very seriously, when making predictions. Sometimes it works. Sometimes though, past can be misleading.
Your thoughts?