7 The Art of Doing Nothing comentada em 29/08/2025 09:39 #PAS MarkFord em 28/08/25 16:28 comentada em 29/08/2025 09:39 In a typical experiment of this kind, researchers flash two lights, one green and one red, onto a screen. Four out of five times, it’s the green light that flashes; the other 20% of the time, the red light comes on. But the exact sequence is kept random. In guessing which light will flash next, the best strategy is simple to predict green every time, since you stand an 80% chance of being right. And that’s what rats or pigeons generally do when the experiments reward them with a crumb of food or correctly guessing what color the next flash of light will be.Humans, however, tend to flunk this kind of experiment. Instead of just picking green all the time and locking in an 80% chance of being right, people will typically pick green four out of five times, quickly getting caught up in the game of trying to call when the next red flash will come up. On average, this misguided confidence leads people to pick the next flash accurately on only 68% of their tries. Stranger still, humans will persist in this behavior even when the researchers tell them explicitly — as you cannot do with a rat or pigeon — that the flashing light is random. And, while rodents and birds usually learn quite quickly how to maximize their score, people often perform worse the longer they try to figure it out.The Art of Doing Nothing - A Wealth of Common Sense
