That brings us back to Spotify, Apple, and their peculiar dilemma.Īll the way back in 2014, which is basically a century ago in tech startup time, Lukáš Poláček wasn't technically a full-time Spotify employee. THE HOT HAND: The Mystery and Science of Streaks. 'People see patterns where there are none,' Tversky once said, 'and they invent causes to explain them.' It was that we have a nasty habit of systematically misperceiving randomness - and such biases can lead us in all kinds of funky directions. And the third was the one that Apple and Spotify understood. The second was that humans fundamentally overestimate streakiness. The first was that the hot hand in basketball was a fallacy. There were three major findings in their study. This made for a bombshell of a scholarly paper. As much as basketball players and basketball fans believed they were more likely to make their next shot after making a few consecutive shots - that they couldn't miss because they were in the zone - the evidence actually suggested the opposite. Their study examined streaks in basketball, and when a team of authors that included the great Amos Tversky looked at the hot hand, they couldn't believe the data that was staring them back in the face. The hot hand has been a topic of fierce academic debate since the 1985 publication of a deeply counterintuitive paper with a delicious conclusion: that there is no such thing as the hot hand. One of the most beautiful examples of this phenomenon is a classic psychological bias that has been studied for several decades by some of the smartest people on earth. Which makes it precisely the sort of thing that psychologists study.

There is something about the way that randomness paralyzes the human mind that was beyond the control of Spotify, Apple or any other company worth billions of dollars.

What is spotify shuffle