Topics Probability

Question I'm going to ask a somewhat bizarre question concerning casuality, probability, and the nature of belief so bear with me thanks! Suppose a craps player goes to two casinos in Macau, the first one architecturally built according to feng shui principles and a second one not according to feng shui principles. Feng shui is an ancient Chinese system of geomancy that modern psychologists tend to discredit. This craps player personally believes in feng shui himself but only to a moderate extent. He frequents both casinos equally and bets exactly the same way every time but he usually wins at the first casino and usually loses at the second casino. 1) Does this prove that feng shui is "real," at least for him? 2) Pragmatically, even if feng shui isn't "real" or cannot be proven to be real, isn't it advisable for him to stop going to the second casino? 3) Can psychology really influence probability involving human decisions?

Accepted:
July 18, 2013

Comments

Statistics could give evidence that something about one of the casinos makes it more likely that your gambler will win there. Feng shui could be the explanation, though it would be a funny sort of feng shui that only worked for some of the gamblers, and so if it is feng shui, the casino may not be in business long!

The more general question is whether there could be serious evidence that the gambler is more likely to win in one casino than the other, and the answer to that is yes. It might be feng shui, but other explanations, weird and mundane, would also be possible. (Maybe he's an unwitting participant in a psychology experiment; and the experimenters load the dice in his favor in one of the casinos.) Careful observation and experiment might even hone in on the explanation, if there really is a stable phenomenon to be explained.

As for the pragmatic question, why not? If the evidence suggests that he's more likely to win in one casino than the other, he could go with the evidence without committing himself to an explanation.

I'm having a bit of trouble understanding your third question. Do you mean: "Can psychological factors influence the probabilities of outcomes of decisions?" then the answer is surely yes, but typically for mundane reasons. If I make a decision and I'm confident as I carry it out, for example, that may make it more likely that things will go well. On the other hand, psychological factors aren't the sort of thing we'd expect to influence dice. Could they?

We've now reached a question about parapsychology or something in the neighborhood. On the one hand, there doesn't seem to be much evidence for psychokinesis or other parapsychological phenomena. Furthermore, given our general knowledge about how the world works, it would be surprising if such things were real. But they could be real; no a priori argument can show otherwise. And if they were real, we could have good evidence to believe that they were. But - to keep to the casino theme - it's not the sort of thing you should bet on.