I wonder if there's an evolutionary reason for that preference or if this is just an edge case in our rewards system that never mattered until it became heavily exploited by other humans in the modern world.
I think it is a learning mechanism. The real world is very deterministic, if a process has seemingly random outcomes then most likely there is something about it you don't understand, so you repeat it over and over trying to make connections to understand why the different outcomes happens.
You can see this a lot in gambling addicts trying to find different ways to beat the system etc, trying to predict which number will appear (even though it isn't possible) and so on. Our brains just aren't made to deal with lotteries since lotteries isn't a thing found in nature. Some things looks like lotteries, some nuts might be bad after you open them so was a waste of time, but then you open many nuts and think hard trying to predict which nuts will be bad, and then you no longer need to open the bad ones saving you lots of work. But the artificial nuts are just random, there is no system to solve, so people just get stuck.
Imagine that a flaw is exposed in a cheap slot machine that slightly shifts the odds in the player's favor. Because of the low bet value in the slot machine, the rewards ends up being something like $10/hour.
Case A:
The bug neutralizes the slot odds and adds a constant $0.005 usd that accumulates every pull. Times 30 pulls per minute times 60 pulls per hour = 9 bucks an hour.
Case B:
The reward neutralizes the odds but adds a random $600 drop with 1/126,000 probability (ie, once a week).
The expected value of both games is the same, but I feel like people would get addicted to the second while the first would feel like a job.
Jensson|4 years ago
You can see this a lot in gambling addicts trying to find different ways to beat the system etc, trying to predict which number will appear (even though it isn't possible) and so on. Our brains just aren't made to deal with lotteries since lotteries isn't a thing found in nature. Some things looks like lotteries, some nuts might be bad after you open them so was a waste of time, but then you open many nuts and think hard trying to predict which nuts will be bad, and then you no longer need to open the bad ones saving you lots of work. But the artificial nuts are just random, there is no system to solve, so people just get stuck.
Trex_Egg|4 years ago
carlmr|4 years ago
el_nahual|4 years ago
Imagine that a flaw is exposed in a cheap slot machine that slightly shifts the odds in the player's favor. Because of the low bet value in the slot machine, the rewards ends up being something like $10/hour.
Case A: The bug neutralizes the slot odds and adds a constant $0.005 usd that accumulates every pull. Times 30 pulls per minute times 60 pulls per hour = 9 bucks an hour.
Case B: The reward neutralizes the odds but adds a random $600 drop with 1/126,000 probability (ie, once a week).
The expected value of both games is the same, but I feel like people would get addicted to the second while the first would feel like a job.
mlac|4 years ago
Animals may have made it to the berries before you did, so you need to keep looking to find the next patch.
Enginerrrd|4 years ago