Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

To: Physicist; RadioAstronomer; longshadow

From my post of 4 years ago:

The odds against it are so amazingly huge!!!

I've been struggling for a term to apply to this fallacy. The fallacy involves looking back to some earlier and arbitrarily chosen initial state, then speculating on all the nearly infinite events that might have happened (but which didn't happen), and concluding that the present state has such a low degree of probability that it must have been impossible to achieve by natural means. This "reasoning" makes literally everything impossible (and thus miraculous), and it is therefore an absurdity.

The explanation is that if each event in the chain was a natural event, then the whole chain of events was also natural. It only seems improbable in retrospect. Improbability works in the other direction too -- it is unlikely that in the beginning, with all the intervening variables, the final state could have been accurately predicted. (This does make sense, which is why accurate predictions, if unambiguous, are so highly regarded.) I'm onto something here, but I wish I knew what to call it. longshadow, who is lurking here, has suggested The Fallacy of Probabilistic Illiteracy, which is accurate but too cumbersome. I'm still working on it. Perhaps "The fallacy of retrospective astonishment."


203 posted on 05/26/2004 9:44:54 AM PDT by PatrickHenry (Hic amor, haec patria est.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 202 | View Replies ]


To: PatrickHenry
Perhaps "The fallacy of retrospective astonishment."

My goodness, out of all the possible people in the world, what were the odds you'd end up living between the two neighbors you live between? There's six billion people in the world, and you ended up living in between those TWO exact people? What are the chances of that?

BTW, I should have used the expression "Probabilistic Innumeracy" not "... Illiteracy".

207 posted on 05/26/2004 2:52:10 PM PDT by longshadow
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 203 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson