Interesting news from South Africa where a lottery's winning numbers came up as the numbers 5 through 10. (source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-55154525).
It's not impossible that this really happened purely as a matter of chance. In fact, assuming a fair lottery, it's no more/less possible than any other combination of 6 numbers. Yet, for some reason, people jump on it and declare it a scam, rigged, not a coincidence, fraudulent etc. Or immediately call for an investigation.
Why is that?
Why do some people see one thing incredibly unlikely and call it a fake, yet happily accept something else that is equally as incredibly unlikely?
Would the same people calling it fake have considered a winning combination of numbers 7, 12, 24, 28, 32, 39 to be fake? Yet they are equally as (un)likely, are they not?
One could argue that the odds of such a recognisable pattern arising by chance are so low that one would not expect it in a million years of lottery draws, so for it to happen warrants investigation. But this surely holds true of every combination, whether a pattern or not.
So what is it in the human psyche that identifies occurrences of patterns in randomness, patterns that have every right to occur, but deems them suspicious.
Now, it may well be that the lottery in this case really was a scam, a fraud, rigged, etc.
But the question(s) above remains.
It's not impossible that this really happened purely as a matter of chance. In fact, assuming a fair lottery, it's no more/less possible than any other combination of 6 numbers. Yet, for some reason, people jump on it and declare it a scam, rigged, not a coincidence, fraudulent etc. Or immediately call for an investigation.
Why is that?
Why do some people see one thing incredibly unlikely and call it a fake, yet happily accept something else that is equally as incredibly unlikely?
Would the same people calling it fake have considered a winning combination of numbers 7, 12, 24, 28, 32, 39 to be fake? Yet they are equally as (un)likely, are they not?
One could argue that the odds of such a recognisable pattern arising by chance are so low that one would not expect it in a million years of lottery draws, so for it to happen warrants investigation. But this surely holds true of every combination, whether a pattern or not.
So what is it in the human psyche that identifies occurrences of patterns in randomness, patterns that have every right to occur, but deems them suspicious.
Now, it may well be that the lottery in this case really was a scam, a fraud, rigged, etc.
But the question(s) above remains.