Science Fiction

especially randomness. They still gamble, but seldom on silly things like cards, dice, roulette wheels, and never, ever powerball lotteries. They calculate the odds before investing their hard-earned credits, and if it comes out less likely to win than to get struck by lightning, they don't rush down to the local party store.

No, gambling really flourishes among those species like Earth humans whose pattern-matching mental routines got stuck on cause and effect. That's where you get people desperately looking for causes for random events that don't really have a cause, just a statistical frequency, and try to convince themselves they can control random outcomes with crazy superstitions like wearing a lucky T-shirt. You never hear of the Big Heads of Andromeda behaving like that.

But I bet you knew that already.