Moreover, a series of 4 more blacks followed until the first red came on the board. The logic was simple - right? - after a series of 7 blacks, a red will surely come. I couldn't resist and followed the flock. I noticed immediately that more gamblers approached the table. I joined the table at an exciting moment, the digital scoreboard showed a history of 7 black numbers in a row. The first lesson I learned was that it's much easier to play with other people's money, the second was a ruthless stroke of randomness. I was granted a couple of chips by my company during a team event, and I approached a roulette table for the first time in my life. The first collision I had with the phenomenon was in the Estoril casino many years ago. The enemy of regression to the mean is randomness. He discovered that children as well as seeds did not tend to resemble their ancestors but instead, showed sizes statistically much more towards mediocrity (mean). He measured heights of children and parents and, compared it with sizes of successive generations of seeds. It was first described by Sir Francis Galton, a British mathematician in the 19th century. The theory is rather straightforward: When the correlation between two scores is less than perfect, there will be regression to the mean. In fact, we don't handle it at all as we are generally blind to the whole concept.

One remarkable phenomenon, described in the book, is how we handle statistical evidence such as regression to the mean. The financial crisis in 2008 is not that long ago, the pandemic very recent to remind us about gut-over-brain decision taking. Why? Because these signs simply do not fit their agenda and so, they refuse to take them into account. Regression to the meanĪt ESSET ENGAGE, we challenge tunnel visions and group thinking on a daily base as manager and policy makers, in their decision making mental process, sometimes prefer to follow gut feeling over objective signs. It's a wonderful journey through the human mind and, the book spares no opportunity to show how often we fool ourselves in what we like to define as 'logic reasoning'. During the holidays, I took some time to pick up one of my favorite books: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman (2002).

Fool by randomness