Stargazing Guy

– Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

The first of six of Sagan’s twenty most common and perilous pitfalls — many of which are rooted in our chronic discomfort with ambiguity — are available here – one and two (blog 1 of 11), three and four (blog 2 of 11) and five and six (blog 3 of 11).

The seventh and eighth of these pitfalls is covered below, with Sagan’s examples.

7. observational selection, also called the enumeration of favourable circumstances, or as the philosopher Francis Bacon described it, counting the hits and forgetting the misses (e.g., A state boasts of the Presidents it has produced, but is silent on its serial killers)

8. statistics of small numbers — a close relative of observational selection (e.g., “They say 1 out of every 5 people is Chinese. How is this possible? I know hundreds of people, and none of them is Chinese. Yours truly.” Or: “I’ve thrown three sevens in a row. Tonight I can’t lose.”)

Here are some other examples:

7. observational selection – Jill goes to see Miss Annie, who claims to be a psychic who can help her communicate with her dead mother. Miss Annie supposedly relays information from Jill’s mother – “I sense a feminine presence, and a colour … blue … red … purple …” Jill, remembers her mother’s fondness for the colour purple, immediately affirms that her mother indeed wore purple. The wrong guesses (red and blue) that Miss Annie made are quickly forgotten because Jill desperately wants the whole thing to be real.

8. statistics of small numbers – “I just threw double sixes. These dice are hot.”
“My neighbor’s a Mormon and he drinks wine, so I guess most Mormons don’t really follow the no-alcohol tradition.”
“I went to a chiropractor and I feel better, so chiropractic does work after all.”

PS: I love coffee. BuyMeACoffee, leave a message with a date and time and we can share it, remotely, at the same time, and think about the Cosmos.

In the meantime, take care of yourself and if you can, someone else, too, because as Adam Smith said, “we naturally desire not only to be loved but to be lovely”.

Remember, hope lives here.

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