5 posts
The expected value of a lottery ticket is almost always negative. People buy them anyway — and they're not being irrational in the way you might think.
Casino games are random on every individual spin, roll, or hand. But over thousands of plays, the math guarantees the house comes out ahead. Here's how that works.
Blowing on dice, begging the wheel, cursing the coin — we treat random objects as if they have agency. The psychology behind it reveals something fundamental about how humans understand the world.
Seven shows up everywhere — slot machines, dice, religion, psychology experiments. The reasons have less to do with math and more to do with how our brains process the world.
Playing cards have traveled from Tang Dynasty China to European courts to your phone screen. Their design has changed remarkably little — and the reasons why tell us something about how good design endures.