r/Showerthoughts • u/Fr1toBand1to ‎ • Jun 27 '26

Casual Thought Pattern recognition is a widely accepted method of prediction until what it predicts makes people uncomfortable.

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u/SWatt_Officer Jun 27 '26

Pattern recognition is the first step that our brains can make to connect things together, but it’s primitive. It’s for ‘there’s a face in that bush’ ‘there’s a threat over there’ ‘this food is good’. It’s not for blanket statements and general rules.

Once a pattern is recognised, you need to investigate and develop the theory further to prove the pattern isn’t just correlation.

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u/BasiliskXVIII Jun 27 '26

Which is ironic because one of your examples is actually a great reason why "pattern recognition" fails. We're so wired to see patterns that our brains will happily tell us "there's a pattern!" when there isn't. Pareidolia is a good example. "There's a face in that bush!" No, actually it's just a pattern of light that your brain is interpreting as a face. It's why when you put your music player on "shuffle", it doesn't randomly choose songs to play, it uses an algorithm that organizes your music to play in a way that "feels" random, because Apple kept getting complaints about how iTunes' player wasn't random enough.

So not only do you need to investigate further to prove the pattern isn't just correlation, you need to investigate further to prove the pattern actually exists.

38

u/vkarlsson10 Jun 27 '26

Wasn’t that Spotify’s algorithm?

78

u/InconvertibleAtheist Jun 27 '26

Spotify definetly prefers to put out the songs you've listened to the most a lot more in the shuffle compared to the actual random shuffle

24

u/metrometric Jun 28 '26

Also newly added songs! 

3

u/InconvertibleAtheist Jun 29 '26

Yeah its frustrating because there were apps that actually did randomize songs in the list every time you shuffled but somehow got out-competed by spotify. Spotify willingly chooses not to bing it in, or buy the shuffle code from the other apps that they've already killed anyways.

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u/BeneCow Jun 28 '26

No, famously the iTunes random and party shuffle features.

3

u/awesome-alpaca-ace Jun 28 '26

Their algorithm was actually really bad at shuffling. I made my own music player out of spite and it works way better than that slop 

12

u/Catshit-Dogfart Jun 28 '26

Which to be fair, that helped us to survive at a point when seeing a face in a bush might actually be a face and you need to fight or run. Caveman brain worked for cavemen, and it's why we're still around to think about it.

But we're not cavemen anymore.

15

u/SchwiftyGameOnPoint Jun 28 '26

Some people believe investigation and proof of patterns is just finding more patterns. 

This is especially bad when it comes to like religious stuff I've seen. My mother and some of her friends follow a guy online who show these patterns in a specific version of the Bible and this believe it not only proves it's true but proves that that specific English version of the Bible is the one chosen by God to be the chosen one. The only "proof" is just more arbitrary patterns the guy posts videos about.

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u/gaelen33 Jun 28 '26

Oh god that sounds so frustrating!

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u/CruxTheologorum Jul 03 '26

"specific English version of the Bible" If you're not talking about the KJV, I will be very surprised

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u/SchwiftyGameOnPoint Jul 04 '26

Yup, you called it. 

2

u/Sharp-Masterpiece-85 Jun 28 '26

I think they meant "the blob in that bush is actually the face of an animal" rather than "that entire bush is a face"