And The Run That Must Surely Continue

The opposite belief, that a streak has momentum of its own, is the very same error.

The mirror image of expecting a correction is expecting continuation. Things have gone well several times, so you conclude that you are in a good patch, that something has aligned, that the current conditions will hold. The language gives it away: on a roll, in form, hot at the moment. It feels like a completely different intuition from expecting a reversal, and in emotional terms it is. In logical terms it is identical. Both take a run of independent events and treat the run itself as information about what comes next. Both grant the past an influence it does not have.

What makes this one harder to shake is that it is sometimes right. Not every sequence is independent. A person really can be in better form because they are rested, practised and confident, and those conditions persist for a while. Warm weather really does cluster, because the systems producing it move slowly across a region. A busy queue really does predict a busy queue a minute later, because the crowd has not gone anywhere. So the streak sometimes carries genuine signal, and the task is not to dismiss all streaks but to ask whether a mechanism exists that could plausibly link one event to the next.

That is the question worth carrying around. Is there a physical, social or practical channel by which the last outcome could influence this one? For a tossed coin there is none, so the streak is scenery. For weather, fatigue, reputation and traffic there is, so the streak may be a clue. Same shape, different substance, and the whole art is telling them apart.