Why Are Gamers So Much Better Than Scientists at Catching Fraud?

In the competitive pursuit of speedrunning, gamers vie to complete a given video game as quickly as humanly possible. It's a sport for the nerdier among us, and it's amazingly popular: Videos streaming and recording speedruns routinely rack up seven-figure view counts on Twitch and YouTube. So when one very prominent speedrunner--a U.S. YouTuber with more than 20 million subscribers who goes by the nom de game "Dream"--was accused in December 2020 of faking one of his world-record runs of the block-building game Minecraft, the online drama exploded like a batch of TNT. Specifically, Dream reported that he'd finished Minecraft in just over 19 minutes, faster than all but four players had ever managed it, because of an incredible stretch of good luck. According to their impressively detailed probability analysis, Dream's luck was just too good. He was the equivalent of a roulette player who gets their color 50 times in a row: You don't just marvel at the good fortune; you check underneath the table.