Avram Hiller, Dept. of Philosophy, Portland State University—Random processes inevitably produce streaks. Many social scientists have argued that ordinary people have a fallacious tendency to impart meaning onto random streaks even when there are no meaningful factors causing them. For instance, sportscasters often say that a player who has made several shots in a row has a hot hand. But in a seminal 1985 paper, Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky argue that the distribution of makes and misses is not statistically significantly different from what one would expect from chance alone, and thus hot hands don’t exist. In the decades since, hot hand skepticism has extended to multiple domains, where random patterns are held to be causally meaningless. In this presentation, I will argue that the sportscasters are right, and the social scientists are wrong. Randomness is compatible with meaningfulness in cases when there is a meaningful factor causing a streak that is itself distributed randomly. If no statistically significant pattern is found in basketball shooting, then it is more likely that players’ skill level varies randomly than that hot hands are illusory. More generally, I show how this type of oversight has led to misunderstandings regarding regression to the mean, cancer clusters, financial streaks, and the Dunning-Kruger effect.