The Law of Fives's Siamese twin, Confirmation Bias, has a lesser known cousin called the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. It describes how your mind creates order after the fact to make sense of disorder.
From You Are Not So Smart... (http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/09/11/the-texas-sharpshooter-fallacy/)
The Misconception: You take randomness into account when determining cause and effect.
The Truth: You tend to ignore random chance when the results seem meaningful or when you want a random event to have a meaningful cause.
Source: http://stanhamiltonartgallery.com
(http://youarenotsosmart.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/lincolnkennedy.jpg?w=300&h=244)
Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy were both presidents of the United States, elected 100 years apart. Both were shot and killed by assassins who were known by three names with 15 letters, John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, and neither killer would make it to trial.
Spooky, huh? It gets better.
Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy, and Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln.
They were both killed on a Friday while sitting next to their wives, Lincoln in the Ford Theater, Kennedy in a Lincoln made by Ford.
Both men were succeeded by a man named Johnson – Andrew for Lincoln and Lyndon for Kennedy. Andrew was born in 1808. Lyndon in 1908.
What are the odds?
In 1898, Morgan Robertson wrote a novel titled "Futility."
Written 14 years before the Titanic sank, 11 years before construction on the vessel even began, the similarities between the book and the real event are eerie.
The novel describes a giant boat called the Titan which everyone considers unsinkable. It is the largest ever created, and inside it seems like a luxury hotel – just like the as yet unbuilt Titanic.
Titan had only 20 lifeboats, half than it needed should the great ship sink. The Titanic had 24, also half than it needed.
In the book, the Titan hits an iceberg in April 400 miles from Newfoundland. The Titanic, years later, would do the same in the same month in the same place.
The Titan sinks, and more than half of the passengers die, just as with the Titanic. The number of people on board who die in the book and the number in the future accident are nearly identical.
The similarities don't stop there. The fictional Titan and the real Titanic both had three propellers and two masts. Both had a capacity of 3,000 people. Both hit the iceberg close to midnight.
Did Robertson have a premonition? I mean, what are the odds?
In the 1500s, Nostradamus wrote:
QuoteBêtes farouches de faim fleuves tranner
Plus part du champ encore Hister sera,
En caige de fer le grand sera treisner,
Quand rien enfant de Germain observa.
This is often translated to:
QuoteBeasts wild with hunger will cross the rivers,
The greater part of the battle will be against Hister.
He will cause great men to be dragged in a cage of iron,
When the son of Germany obeys no law.
That's rather creepy, considering this seems to describe a guy with a tiny mustache born about 400 years later. Here is another prophecy:
QuoteOut of the deepest part of the west of Europe,
From poor people a young child shall be born,
Who with his tongue shall seduce many people,
His fame shall increase in the Eastern Kingdom.
Wow. Hister certainly sounds like Hitler, and that second quatrain seems to drive it home. Actually, Many of Nostradamus' predictions are about a guy from Germania who wages a great war and dies mysteriously.
What are the odds?
If any of this seems too amazing to be coincidence, too odd to be random, too similar to be chance, you are not so smart.
You see, in all three examples the barn was already peppered with holes. You just drew bullseyes around the spots where the holes clustered together.
Allow me to explain.
Say you go on a date, and the other person reveals they drive the same kind of car you do. It's a different color, but the same model.
Well, that's sort of neat, but nothing amazing.
Let's say later on you learn their mom's name is the same as your mom's, and your mothers have the same birthday.
Hold on a second. That's pretty cool. Maybe the hand of fate is pushing you toward the other person. Later still, you find out you both own the box set of Monty Python's Flying Circus, and you both grew up loving Rescue Rangers. You both love pizza, but hate rutabagas.
This is meant to be, you think. You are made for each other.
But, take a step back. Now, take another.
How many people in the world own that model of car? You are both about the same age, so your mothers are too, and their names were probably common in their time. Since you have similar backgrounds and grew up in the same decade, you probably share the same childhood TV shows. Everyone loves Monty Python. Everyone loves pizza. Many people hate rutabagas.
Looking at the factors from a distance, you can accept the reality of random chance.
When you desire meaning, when you want things to line up, you forget about stochasticity. You are lulled by the signal. You forget about noise. With meaning, you overlook randomness, but meaning is a human construction.
You have just committed the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.
(http://youarenotsosmart.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/wadcutter-bull.jpg?w=300&h=300)
The fallacy gets its name from imagining a cowboy shooting at a barn. Over time, the side of the barn becomes riddled with holes. In some places there are lots of them, in others there are few. If the cowboy later paints a bullseye over a spot where his bullet holes clustered together it looks like he is pretty good with a gun.
By painting a bullseye over a bullet hole the cowboy places artificial order over natural random chance.
If you have a human brain, you do this all of the time. Picking out clusters of coincidence is a predictable malfunction of normal human logic.
When you are dazzled by the idea of Nostradamus predicting Hitler, you ignore how he wrote almost 1,000 ambiguous predictions, and most of them make no sense at all. He seems even less interesting when you find out Hister is the Latin name for the Danube River.
When you marvel at the similarities between the Titan and the Titanic, you disregard that in the novel only 13 people survived, and the ship sank right away, and the Titan had made many voyages, and it had sails. In the novel, one of the survivors fought a polar bear before being rescued.
When you are befuddled by the Lincoln and Kennedy connections, you neglect to notice Kennedy was Catholic and Lincoln was born Baptist. Kennedy was killed with a rifle, Lincoln with a pistol. Kennedy was shot in Texas, Lincoln in Washington D.C. Kennedy had lustrous auburn hair, while Lincoln wore a haberdasher's wet dream.
With all three examples there are thousands of differences, all of which you ignored, but when you draw the bullseye around the clusters, the similarities – whoa.
If hindsight bias and confirmation bias had a baby, it would be the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.
When reality shows are filmed, the producers have hundreds of hours of footage. When they condense that footage into an hour, they paint a bullseye around a cluster of holes. They find a narrative in all the mundane moments, extracting the good bits and tossing aside the rest. This means they can create any orderly story they wish from their reserves of chaos.
Was that one girl really a horrific bitch? Was that guy with the tattoos really that dumb? Unless you can pull back and see the entire barn, you'll never know.
The reach of the fallacy is far greater than reality shows, presidential trivia and spooky coincidences. When you use the sharpshooter fallacy to determine cause from effect, it can harm people.
more here: http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/09/11/the-texas-sharpshooter-fallacy/
Read this yesterday in my RSS - Interesting stuff, the barn door analogy works really well I think.
Nostrodamus was even criticized during his own lifetime for making vague pronouncements which people could then see into any event they cared to name. Even other court astrologists pointed this out.
I never really fell into it, but I remember back in the college days I had a thing for this girl. Turned out we had the same birthday. I mean the exact same birthday. Same month, same day, same year. We were both from French-Canadian heritage. We were in the same major. Both like the Montreal Canadiens, etc., etc.,
But, zoom out....she drank like a fish. And didn't like puns.
And ended up marrying and jiving much better with someone who represents many polar opposites of my personality.
Anyway, good stuff Cram. I enjoyed reading that.
I like it. Awesome find.
Cool stuff. You almost had me for a while with the Titanic story :)
And, of course, the coincidences you mention mean assuming that what you say is true...which I don't. XD
I like this, although I would have liked to see him do a little more exploration of why we it is intelligent to investigate coincidences before dismissing them.
That's pretty cool. Thanks, Cramulus.
And: lots of people know that when they find out coincidences-that-look-like-something-meaningful, they're making up an order from coincidences-that-are-coincidences. They know that in theory.
But when actually involved in a "conspiracy theory" or something like that, notice that most of them forget about the theory and go on thinking and talking about the lenght of the Missisipi River that is 1/666 of the number of tiles on the floor of that room in the White House vel similia. Because, obviously, they want to find the Devil/the Conspiracy/God/the Sasquatch (or the God of Sasquatches, that would be original). Emotionally, they are sure of what they'll find. Logic follows the lead easily.
As King Mob said in Grant Morrison's masterpiece, "The Invisibles": "They are all coincidences. Like the coincidence of the light that comes when you push the button."
(The quote is not like that, I translated it from my Italian comic book, and with an horrible language, so forgive me and try to understand its meaning anyway, thank you)