exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

I seem to find that every time I go to the supermarket and pick a checkout line, I pick the one that has issues.

I also seem to find that every time I place an order on the webstore here, within a week or so something else breaks and I need to place yet another order. I'm 100% certain that if I just waited to place the order a few weeks, nothing would break and so I wouldn't need to order anything after all. Anyone else find themselves in this kind of a paradox?

By the way, the same thing goes with Mouser and Digikey orders! Not with Amazon though.....not sure why there (probably because of the free shipping maybe?)

This could be the rumoured "confirmation bias", that makes us remember all the occurrence when it went wrong (more likely eventful, high signal to noise ratio), and forget all the occurrence when it went right (more likely not eventful, low signal to noise ratio).

The only way one would remove this bias would be to log every event and crunch the number to assess whether one is truly unlucky, if there is a streak of bad luck, or if it is just random.

I totally agree with you on the confirmation bias there. We (I) tend to clearly remember all the bad occurrences that confirms my hypothesis I laid out. It's so much easier to forget when things went entirely to plan...