Status Updates From Chance, Love, and Logic: Ph...

Life is difficult. In this way, it is probable that a healthy amount of denial and blissful optimism may even be adaptive. The important thing often for organisms is not that they have a completely correct view of the world, but that they can move forward even though their view is flawed

Taking a probabilistic view of the world is useful but has a caveat. In probability problem sets there is often the assumption that the cards in the deck, the marbles in the jar, etc, are perfectly shuffled.
Life does not work this way. Life is an imperfectly shuffled deck, where cards are often stacked in clumps. A coin flip will over iterations approach 50%, but human habit & material variance prevents equality.

“The doctrine of chances” life is at the end of the day probabilistic. We must gamble one way or another. But certain strategies seem to be aligned with more success than others, statistically. Men certainly act against reason, as men have desires that are complicated and self contradictory. Still, there is an element of reason in our actions, given the amount that we are aware of the rules.