Just read an article by Leonard Mlodinow, the author of “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives” (via). Same story again. We are emotional beings who often make decisions based on intuitions which are often wrong when compared against the cold hard data. And even worse, when we look back at events, we only see the big signs that bad things were happening and forget about all the noise.
We’re just human, man. Anyway, from the peanut gallery…
“Properly speaking, there is no certainty; there are only people who are certain.”
—Charles Renouvier, second part of “Essais de critique générale,” 1859.
Which led me, as so often the Internet does, to the lovable Micheal Shermer, who always puts a damper on everything…
In their delightful book Debunked! (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), CERN physicist Georges Charpak and University of Nice physicist Henri Brochshow how the application of probability theory to such events is enlightening. In the case of death premonitions, suppose that you know of 10 people a year who die and that you think about each of those people once a year. One year contains 105,120 five minute intervals during which you might think about each of the10 people, a probability of one out of 10,512—certainly an improbable event. Yet there are 295 million Americans. Assume,for the sake of our calculation, that they think like you. Thatmakes 1⁄10,512 × 295,000,000 = 28,063 people a year, or 77 people a day for whom this improbable premonition becomes probable.With the well-known cognitive phenomenon of confirmation bias firmly in force (where we notice the hits and ignore the misses in support of our favorite beliefs), if just a couple of these
people recount their miraculous tales in a public forum (next on Oprah!), the paranormal seems vindicated.