Slaog said:
It's much easier to understand the science behind [The Secret] if you see everything as energy. We are all energy. Everything physical is pure energy but it jusy appears physical to out senses. Atoms are just balls of energy and they are more then 99.99% empty. In quantum physics its proven that the mind can effect matter.
I don't want to belabor the point, since I thoroughly explained it
here and
here with academic citations, but there was no science in
The Secret. Quantum physics does not support mind over matter, actually. While it's true the act of measuring something inherently can influence the properties of said measured thing, the mind plays no part. As Columbia University quantum physicist David Albert explains, the early 20th century saw a crisis in physics with the development of quantum physics, but the latter half of the century witnessed a resolution to the crisis and science is progressing back to clockwork mechanism.
I know a fella who started gambling a few years ago. He's not the brightest and he is thousands of Euro in [debt] now. The interesting thing about he is that when he first started gambling he started to win and kept winning for months. He was winning 10's of thousands of Euro. He bought a new car and everything. Another gambler I know said he couldn't understand how the guy was winning so much because he hadn't a clue of horses but everything thing he picked out was winning. The other guy said that he's end up losing everything because he was betting on everything he could.
Eventually after many months the winning run came to an end. He started to lose and now 2 or 3 years later is probably around 100,000e in debt. His luck ran out. Or was it luck. My belief is that when he first started gambling he believed and expected to win. He wasn't smart enough to know about odds etc so he attracted that winning run to his life.
Well, hot and cold streaks are perfectly explained by random probability, regardless of someone's education and cognitive awareness of probability statistics. Every poker player knows some nights are full of hot hands and other nights are complete crap, regardless of one's beliefs. Ask "Jesus" Chris Ferguson, one of the top poker players in the world and who holds a PhD in mathematics, and he will laugh at any suggestion the winnings and losses at gambling -- of any sort -- are predicated upon belief except in the very limited context of persistence and risk aversion. Gambling in particular is designed so the house always wins, disparaging even the most confident and believing players, sooner or later, to lose everything. Over the past few decades horse racing has been evolving to be more probability-based than horse-based, thanks to improvements of training which marginalize the differences between horses, but nonetheless streaks are still explained by probability theory.
There is also the possibility of cheating.