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If you seek for a pattern long enough, you will find one.

Posted by robkraft on June 10, 2011

If you seek for a pattern long enough, you will find one.  Many people have sought numerical patterns in books, particularly in the Bible.  They keep applying different numerical algorithms until the find an algorithm that produces the results they seek.  Then they claim they have found some sort of truth.  If you apply this approach to any document, you will eventually find the truth you are looking for.

Our brains have evolved to search for patterns.  If you flip coins in groups of 10 hundreds of times, and you count how many times it lands on heads in each group of ten, and then you analyze the results, you will find some patterns.  This is not because there is a pattern (such as if you have 8 heads in one set, you will have 3 in the next set), but simply because you claimed that to be the pattern because it happens to fit all the existing data.  If it truly is a pattern, then it will always hold truth for the future coin tosses.

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