This is the mistaken belief that past outcomes influence future ones in random, independent systems. Like thinking a number is "due" to hit just because it hasn't come up in a while. Or assuming a recent streak will magically continue, or suddenly reverse, just because it's "about time."

A few years back, I made a video that showed how to use Excel to highlight winning lottery numbers. Totally harmless. You paste in past results and your picks, and it flags your matches. But ever since then, I keep getting the same question over and over: "Do you know an algorithm to predict winning numbers?" No, dude. And if I did, I'd be using it myself and definitely not posting it online. Come on.

People think if a number hasn't shown up in a while, it's due. Or if one has come up a lot lately, it's less likely to show again. But lottery drawings are statistically independent. Every number has the same chance every single time. There's no memory. There's no pattern.

My wife is this way with scratchies. She loves those scratch-off lottery tickets and will always go back and buy them where she had a winner before. I keep telling her it doesn't work that way - every place is just as likely to have a winning ticket as not. But superstitions die hard.

Like the pitcher who refuses to change his socks because he's on a winning streak. Yeah, like your stank-ass socks are helping you win. LOL.

This fallacy is also known as the Monty Carlo Fallacy. One of the most striking real-world examples is the infamous 1913 incident at the Monte Carlo Casino. During a game of roulette, the ball landed on black 26 times in a row. Gamblers, believing that red was "due," bet heavily against black, resulting in massive losses when black continued to come up. This event is a textbook case of the gambler's fallacy, where individuals assume that past random events influence future ones, despite each spin being independent.

Same thing happens in IT*.

I had a client years ago who stopped checking his backups. For years, every backup job completed successfully. So he figured, why bother looking? One day, the server crashed, and surprise - the last good backup was three months old. Something had silently failed. Nobody noticed because they assumed past success meant future success. But just because something has always worked doesn't mean it always will. Backups need verification. Logs need checking. Systems don't owe you a lucky streak.

So put a reminder on your calendar: check your backups. Manually verify the files are copying correctly. It's one thing to have a backup system in place. It's another to verify it. I have a nightly backup of all of my critical files. I have a weekly reminder on my calendar to manually verify said backups.

A great example of the gambler's fallacy shows up in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Season 3, Episode 8 - The Price*. Several groups, including the Ferengi and the Federation, are negotiating for rights to use what appears to be a stable wormhole. They send a probe through, and it exits into the Delta Quadrant and then returns through the same spot. Based on that one round trip, everyone assumes the wormhole is fixed and reliable. But it's not. A second probe fails to return, and it's discovered that the wormhole's exit point moves unpredictably. The Ferengi, convinced by the apparent pattern, fly a shuttle into it and get stranded on the far side of the galaxy. They gambled on consistency where none existed. Years later, we find them again in Voyager, having taken over a primitive culture. This is gambler's fallacy in action: assuming that just because something behaved a certain way once or twice, it's going to keep doing that. Spoiler: it doesn't.

I almost used the example of Riker playing poker. He bluffs a lot, and the other characters often think, well, because Riker bluffs more than someone like Data, he's probably bluffing again. But that's not exactly the gambler's fallacy. That involves human behavior, not randomness. Riker chooses whether to bluff or not. There's a pattern there. People who bluff often are more likely to bluff again, and those who rarely bluff are usually playing straight. So it's not purely random. That said, it is a lot more surprising when someone like Data decides to bluff. But even then, it's not gambler's fallacy - it's psychology and behavior. Although, now that I think about it, Data is an android... maybe he uses a random number generator to decide when to bluff. Wouldn't surprise me. Probably a subroutine called "Strategic Deception v2.1" or something.

The bottom line: random doesn't mean predictable. Random doesn't mean fair. Whether you're writing code, drawing lottery balls, or watching temporal loops unfold on the viewscreen, don't assume the universe is keeping score. It isn't.

LLAP
RR

* Can't have a good Captain's Log without an IT example and a Star Trek reference. :)