Check Your Bias

Fortune brings in some boats that are not steer'd. - William Shakespeare

Introduction

We all have biases. Weeding out biases is at the heart of scientific inquiry. This is not easy to do, even among scientists. Among us laymen (atheist and theist alike) we have all sorts of biases. One of the greatest aspects of the scientific method is to properly filter out these biases. The system in science is set up in a way where peer-review critiques various professional papers presented on pet theories by scientists. The competitiveness among scientists is what keeps scientific peer-review so robust and healthy - it's also what gives rise to what we consider the theories and laws of reality.

It's easy to spot a bias when the person is unlike you. For me it's easy to spot a bias in a Christian who is only picking the "nice" verses in the Bible to share on social media or in sermons to congregations, while ignoring the "difficult verses" or even the verses that portray an evil god who gives immoral commandments. You never hear a Christian or Islamic apalogist cry "OUT OF CONTEXT!" or "You need scholarly work to understand this passage" when you discuss the "nice" verses. This is only cried when dealing with slavery, murder, rape or other immoral pronouncements from god. There is a  difficulty in these passages and how they must be combed over and over to find some deep contextualized meaning that can't just be "god condones owning another human being"; while at the same time other "nice" passages get a pass and slip right through critiques. See, those passages you can take face value, no problem! (post a quick verse here or there on your social media account. No context needed!) I call this the "niceness bias of holy books". And New Christians do this constantly.

A lot of what is wrong with the world can be traced to our faulty intuitions. And can you blame us really? We are an evolved species of ape that was never "meant" to do difficult probability mathematics or study the atomic world or vast cosmos. We evolved like all other animals to survive and reproduce. The evolution of our brain has given rise to a "super organism", so to speak - the modern human race. We are all interconnected now through the internet. We are vastly moving towards a singularity-type moment where we could very well overcome our biology and take consciousness to a whole new level of being.

I feel the main biases can be broken down into three categories. If you browse through any college intro to philosophy textbook you will find a much larger list of biases but for this blog I want to just name a few that I feel are some of the most important and that trip us up the most.

1. Perspective Bias

One of the clearest biases we all share to some degree is the "perspective bias". This is where we judge everything within our own bubble without looking with an open mind or ever at all outside of this bubble. I would suggest many Republicans and Democrats do this. For Republicans I know Fox News and talk radio is where the vast majority of their information comes from. I don't have to reiterate too much that Fox News is not /actually/ fair and balanced. The CEO is a right-wing political activist so naturally his news channel leans to the right. Fox News presents itself as "fair and balanced" not by actually being fair and balanced but by spending a vast majority of its programming time stating how "liberal bias" is controlling all /other/ news organization. So their idea of "fair and balanced" is to be the opposite of this - hyper-conservative, to contrast with all that liberal news. There is some truth to Fox News most media is "liberal bias" claim. For example there is a democrat-bais among MSNBC but it's hardly the mass-liberal cabal of all news Fox News pundits paint nightly.

So tribalism is fuel to the entire political system. Perspective can be minimized when all information is propaganda from one side or the other. Often I've had conversation with Republican friends that say that they base their political worldview on the "everyday" / hardworking Americans they talk to on the street who say this or that about their taxes or income, etc. However this perspective alone is not enough to get a healthy well-rounded worldview. Anecdotal evidence is not the only evidence we must consider if we want to minimize biases. Take climate change for instance. This is a very political "hot topic" (no pun intended) among Republican voters, but at its core it's a topic of science. Getting the opinion of your mailman or your coworker (who do not have advanced degrees in climate science) is not a legitimate way to build your opinion on climate change and if it's really caused by human activity or not.

Many of these same Republican friends I know have a bias towards (dare I say, without sounding like a New Feminist??!) "white, male, American privilege". There is a myth that we all start on the same level in this country and can get to where we want to be if we just pull ourselves up by our bootstraps because the system is fair and balanced for all Americans. This is generally a Republican view, but evidence doesn't align with this. Clearly a white American boy born into a wealthy or even financially comfortable family has the cards stacked in his favor compared to a black kid born to a drug-addicted mother living on the streets of Skid Row.

( If you want your "perspective bias" shaken then watch the documentary "Lost Angels: Skid Row Is My Home": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvG_UlvqggA )

"Perspective bias" is important to notice while making statements like "we need to slash food stamp funding" or "those welfare queens are milking the system" or "cut medicaid" and so on. These things seem to be coming from a one-sided perspective - that of being that white boy all grown up that I mentioned first. This of course is just dealing with America specifically. We expand this to the world and one's "perspective bias" grows increasingly more obvious.

2. Time Bias

One of the biggest biases we have is a "time bias". Here is a bias that is built into our evolutionary fabric. We are not naturally evolved to grasp "deep time". This is why intuition gets you such things as Young Earth Creationism or even Old Earth Creationism (AKA: Intelligent Design.) If we can let our minds do the extremely difficult thing and accept the isotropic radiometric dating evidence of rocks that the Earth is 4.543 (that's so precise that it's at 4 significant figures!) than we can begin to understand the massive stage of time evolution of all life has to work with. What anti-evolutionist or anti-deep-time believers want is for us to point to the exact transitional moment between this species and that species. As my friend (Gog) once said this is akin to watching a full 9-month sonogram of a developing fetus second by second and asking to point out the /exact/ moment the fetus is human. Anyone that knows the basics of evolution will tell you speciation is gradual, usually over millions of years. Most Young Earthers simply have a "time bias", of course coated in a thick layer of religious dogmatism biases.

But the "time bias" can even be in short time spans. Take for example the bias many Tea Party Republicans have towards history. With something as recent as Bush's Iraq War we already see a cognitive dissonance that has it's roots in the "time bias". ISIS would not be in existence today if G. W. Bush had not invaded Iraq and we can all argue which is better between the lesser of two evils: if that psychotic murdering dictator would be better than what we see now ... the rogue growing Islamic state "winning hearts and minds" and taking over territories one by one. But that's peripheral to this.

Most importantly Republicans have a "time bias" here. They do not want to go past this President when talking about American history. They certainly don't want to invoke President Reagan when we talk about amnesty for illegal immigrants. To many Tea Party conservatives President Obama's pulling out of Iraq is what caused ISIS. Which is debatable, but if true can it also not be true that due to Republican "time bias" (they can't criticize Presidents foreign policy decisions prior to Obama) we omit the origin story of ISIS? We see them doing this also to the history of Iran and our country overthrowing Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. We can see this bias in our involvement in Vietnam or the countries involved in the covert wars by the CIA in decades past. Another convenient "time bias" Tea Party Republicans ignore is when President Reagan armed Osama Bin Laden to fight the Russians in Afghanistan... then you know 9/11 happened under President Bush's watch. Again, these things are "time biases" where many Republicans are simply picking and choosing the relevant "times" that fit their narrative of preferred American history.

Time biases have their ugly tentacles embedded in the top monotheistic religions today as well. Take Islam first. This is a religion that essentially "stole" from the Torah and Judaism in writing it's "holy book"- the Quran. Of course, before Islam, Christianity tacked on the "New Testament" to the Jewish Tanakh. So what the big 3 monotheism religions disagree distinctively is: who is precisely God?, if he has a son or not, and what salvation is to name just a few major differences. The other big 2 current monotheistic religions (Christianity and Islam) all were essentially birthed from Judaism. Of course there is some nuance to this but these are some crudely put basic facts.

And this is just here and now. This is just in the past few thousand years of human history. There were gods and religions that predate Yahweh. And this is just monotheism. There's paganism, polytheism was once the norm. Animals and the Earth were once (and still are) worshiped as gods by Native Americans. There are thousands upon thousands of gods in human history and the "time bias" kicks in for New Christians or even moderate Muslims when they take on board the notion that they just /happened/ to be born in this country, in this tribe, in this family, in this time to have gotten the RIGHT god and the RIGHT religion. Special pleading fallacy at it's finest. This is classic "time bias" on full display here. This segues into the next bias:

3. Anthropic Bias

One of the most "solid" arguments religious apologists offer in defense of a god is the "Fine-tuning universe" argument. Basically the argument is that the fundamental constants of the universe are so precise and perfect as to give rise to matter, then our galaxy, this solar system, this planet, then us humans (God's favorite/chosen species of animal). If these constants were just a fraction off none of this would be here - not even matter itself. There is truth to this of course but it cuts to the heart of one of our most difficult biases to detect. - the Anthropic Bias. It's all about the way you look at this information. Cutting out the intuitive "anthropic bias" will help get us closer to /truth/.

We can break this down. A helpful guide to this is from David J. Hand's book The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day. There are four fundamental constants of nature: 1. Strong nuclear force. 2. Cosmic microwave background radiation. 3. The ratio between the mass of the neutron and the mass of the proton. 4. The ratio between the strengths of two fundamental natural forces: the electromagnetic and gravitational forces. (Hand, pp 212-214)

David J. Hand brilliantly explains the problem with theist's "fine-tuning of the universe" argument...

If something is to be "fine-tuned", if it is to have a value within a specified narrow range, clearly its value cannot depend on the units you choose to measure it in. Take the speed of light in a vacuum. This can be measured in miles per second, kilometers per second, or in various other units. Its value in miles per second is 186,282.397 miles per second, its value in kilometers per second is 299,792.458, and its value in light-years per year is 1 (that last value follows from the definition of a light-year: it is the distance that light travels in one year). In fact take any number you like and you can define a length unit and a time unit such that that value is the speed of light. So the speed of light, per se, can hardly be fine-tuned. 

However, some fundamental constants, and some relationships between others, are "dimensionless": they have the same numerical value whatever units of measurement you choose. The ratio between two attributes measured in the same units is an example. The ratio of the mass of the neutron to the mass of the proton is the same (1.00137841917) whether you measure mass in grams, kilograms, or ounces, in just the same way that my mother's height is 80 percent of my father's height whether I use inches or centimeters. The ratio of the strengths of electromagnetic and gravitational forces in my fourth example above is dimensionless because both numerator and denominator are "forces", and hence measured in the same units.

Contrast this with the statement that a friend of mine weighs the same as he is tall: he weighs 170 pounds and he's 170 centimeters tall. You can immediately see that this "relationship" would alter if you changed the units of measurement, since weight and height are measured in different types of unit. In fact, change just the units of height from centimeters to inches and he becomes a "mere" 67 inches tall (while still weighing 170 pounds). The 170=170 is hardly "fine-tuned" since it's purely a consequence of the units we chose to use. Only dimensionless values can be fine-tuned in any meaningful sense. If a description is intended to signify something fundamental about the universe, it must not depend on the particular units you choose. It follows that if a dimensionless constant were to have a different value, the fundamental physics and the nature of the universe would be different. (Hand, pp 214-215)

We homo sapiens have a hard time getting "out of the way" when making judgements about reality. To our credit self-awareness and theory of mind are most uniquely a trait for our species. The fact that we know of our own mortality and death doesn't come as some foreign surprise like it does to other species of animals is fascinating. However, our subjectivity from our evolved ape-brain still trips us up. This happens with the "anthropic bias". This, of course, is at the heart of religion. Some New Christians have offered to me that "Man" is not the center of their particular religion or worldview but that /God/ is. Well, according to the Bible God looks a lot like man and vice versa. If we were made in his image, we share similar traits. This all sounds very anthropic to me. God or man... when looking at this objectively it ultimately seems very "human-centered".

As Hand points out it's all about how you look at probabilities, which measurements you use, and what you are comparing things to. There is a vast majority of religious people that use the "anthropic bias" most of their life. The more we know about the vastness of the cosmos the more it should kill off this "universe with purpose" notion. This "purpose" I'm talking about of course is God and/or God's favorite species of ape on His favorite planet (or if you take mostly just the Old Testament we see God has a favorite ethic group of his favorite ape species - the Jews). This to me is our hard truth to swallow but something we should /really/ be over by now. Our PTSD from this potent information (that there is no "cosmic purpose") we gained years and years ago from science should be something we can move on from at this time. We need to grow up.

Science is knocking on the door of possibilities of alien life out in the cosmos, of artificial intelligence, of ending human death altogether - these things if/when they happen are going to strip the grips on reality religion has for many people. If you think in America people are leaving the faith in droves now (according to recent polls) just wait until science ends death. It's kind of hard to go meet your Savior when you NEVER DIE! The "anthropic bias" will lose some of its strength with each one of these things possibly becoming a reality in the future. Don't confuse my optimism with strong optimism. I understand that we are a superstitious species of ape, and have a long history of such things so belief in all varieties of "woo" will more than likely continue for some for years to come. However, I think over time we will probably see religion morph into something else. Something maybe even unrecognizable from today's big monotheistic religions.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we have many biases because our brains are limited and a wet-grey organ, and a product of evolution by natural selection. We should strive to align our worldview with claims after we have checked our various biases. Wired from our evolutionary past we must confront them one by one to break down the barriers we are born with to arrive at the truth. We will never squash all of our biases and these 3 biases I name above are a spectrum. It's a constant battle of our flawed intuitions. We can only do our best to think critically, starting with ourselves. This is the very soul and heart of scientific thinking and inquiry. We would be well-advised to follow this proven method to arrive at correct views of realty.

Also, you can filter your science through whatever philosophy, religion, or worldview you choose but just remember it does NOTHING to help with the "science part of it", the "evidence-based part of it". You can be a theistic evolutionist (or otherwise described by me to a friend recently - the "theology of biology") or study a Thorism-theology or Paganism-theology of science but it doesn't /add/ to the merit of the science. It just is a tack-on or add-on (whether before, after, or both) to the evidence, the scientific theory, the scientific law, etc. No mono-theist, poly-theist, or atheist uses his God-belief in the lab or in the field of his or her study. The science itself is devoid of these presuppositions. So these things can be fun, sure!, but they are not the meat here. They are the garnish. Some of these lens (whatever philosophical or theological position chosen) are biases.

I was once shown this video by a New Christian about how the laminin (a fibrous protein that makes up some of the cells of the human body) shaped like a cross points to signals of a creator in his creation.  : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0-NPPIeeRk . This is clear example of this person's "theology of science" being problematic; specifically a Christian presupposition (where we are running everything we see from science through one's particular amalgamation of a Christian worldview). Instead, try this: Run your "theology of science" through scrutiny dealing with 3 biases I name above and see if you maybe come to a different philosophical conclusion about the science you are learning.

Bias is everywhere. We live in the Anthropocene Epoch after all. We are bound to hold anthropic biases. We affect the natural world around us so much more than most animals currently do. There is solid reasons for our species to attempt to think better and bigger. To shed bad ideas, and biases. To end lazy thinking. To confront these biases head on. We need more scientifically literate human beings. We need them voting! We need to take a long hard look at ourselves and our biases as we move forward.
 
Some sources:

*Image: "The Great Sloan Wall" 
http://news.softpedia.com/news/The-Sloan-Great-Wall-and-the-End-of-Greatness-173632.shtml

http://www.bibleodyssey.org/tools/bible-basics/what-is-the-difference-between-the-old-testament-the-tanakh-and-the-hebrew-bible.aspx

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanakh

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene

http://www.theolatte.com/2015/11/a-theology-of-science/

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-improbability-principle-david-j-hand/1115382497?ean=9780374535001

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2004/06/reagans_osama_connection.html

In Solidary with Paris 11/14/2015 ... Some Thoughts (A Blog Short)

Tonight France was ripped apart once again by terrorist acts of violence. This time killing 120 people. As social media erupts with solidarity with the people of France we're all reminded that Islamists, fueled by their religious dogma and fanaticism are killing innocent people. What can we do? We are all speechless. I tweeted #ImageNoReligion. That's unhelpful. Who cares? If we could snap our fingers now and Islam never existed would we see this problem? Probably not - which should tell you the religion is at the heart of this matter despite what your liberal friends tell you. I understand the fine line, but American "moderate" Muslims are not most Muslims. We all probably know very peaceful Muslims that live in this country and they actually are lucky enough to live in a free nation that lets them practice their faith. Sure, they face discrimination from asshole redneck conservatives that can't get their tiny brains to actually do something called nuance.

What would you say to these kids, these jihadists if you could? How would you solve this problem? What I think was the worst thing that could have happened was our nation's overreaction after 9/11. I often wonder if democracy would have actually been carried out in 2000 and Gore would have been President during 9/11 if we would have lashed out the same. We'll never know, but the way Bush and the neocons handled it made things SO much worse. It created the mess we are in now by putting boots on the ground and invading a country right at the heart of the Muslim world. The "War on Terror" was started by us. We had the option to take a step back and act smart, but we dusted off the old empire manual and threw our entire military might into an unending war.

Don't get me wrong, I was wrong back then. I was one of those annoying Michael Moore liberals back then that said Islam wasn't the problem it was only American imperialism. I only got half of that right. Our quest for unending war stirred a religious hornets nest and like many modern wars manifested itself into a full on civil war. Islam was also part of the problem. Islam is still part of the problem. We saw that today on full display as men chanted to Allah while blowing themselves and others to bits. There is no denying the connection between religious belief and terrorism - all in a backdrop of America all up in the midst of it all - with an bloated military budget and plenty of war toys to try out on these crazies in their countries.

I want to say to these jihadists you can cause ripples in the world, but don't with bombs. Don't with old ideas old men teach you from old books. Here's how...

Education. Specifically science education. Once you have the tools to understand the physics, mathematics, chemistry, and mechanics behind the tools you use everyday (that's your smart phone I'm talking about Jihad John) you can see the value of innovation and technology for innovation and technology sake. Oh, and also you can make good money and we all want more money, I don't care how many prayers you say a day.

Science -  properly understood, studied, demonstrated via thinking and application is indispensable for living a good life. It opens the most important door that MUST be opened to evolve and become more civilized and social .. - Perspective! Stop praying to old father figures in fanciful supernatural realms and suppressing every single little thing that makes you like another species of animal. I'm not blaming all of you, some of you have no option, some of you are from war-torn countries with a passion for vengeance against the great Satan America for bombing your family who had nothing to do with any of this.

But my hope is to see that science education spreads somehow. Think if instead of bombing a country that had not attacked us on 9/11 but instead shoveled even half the amount of money we did on the Iraq war into educating and giving social programs to help the sick, hungry and poor in many different Muslim countries in the Middle East. Think about that amount of schooling and drive to success if we had done that instead of bombing cities and killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people that of course will now hate us.

Our country, in it's empire form, is not sustainable. We need to rethink how we deal with these countries. At this point I almost suggest pulling out completely and letting the civil war happen between the sects of Islam. Apparently blood has to flow in the streets to sort things out. Religions and their blood. They love a good blood bath from time to time. They must kill off as many people as possible to see which form of the religion is right, which one properly displays God's love the most.

In Solidarity Paris! We stand with you and we need to find a way to stop this virus. This virus of religion -

Let's start with the most violent religion of our time - Islam.

#DreamLivesMatter

The really unusual day would be one where nothing unusual happens. - Persi Diaconis

Late last Friday evening I woke up in the middle of the night terrified by a dream. I explained to my girlfriend the extreme realism of this nightmare. I was on airplane but I wasn't in a seat, but sort of just hovering about watching people calmly talking and resting. Suddenly a loud noise and powerful suction came over the cabin of the plane and people began to scream and panic as the plane started to twist and bend from side to side. I was watching it happening and was helpless to save anyone. It was terrifying as I watched the plane literally rip apart. The tail end of the plane fell back and I could see the top half of the plane and people falling to their death. It was absolutely horrific. I was sweating and panicking when I woke up telling my girlfriend all the details I vividly remembered.

So it was a very realistic bad dream, and a few days later I get a text from my girlfriend asking if I heard about the Russian airplane that broke apart midair the same night I had my dream. I hadn't so I immediately looked up the details. It was a Russian Airbus (A321). It came apart 31,000 feet in the air above Egypt and its 224 passengers were all killed. I was shaken. See, I'm a skeptic. I try to model my viewpoints through skepticism first instead of just accepting any intuition I have or bias I find inviting. I question extraordinary claims and expect extraordinary evidence for these claims. If I "remote viewed" a horrible event doesn't it prove something?! Seems like an extraordinary thing.

In the excellent book by mathematician David J. Hand The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day David writes,

... Here's another striking incident, this time from the book "Synchronicity" by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung. He writes: "The writer Wilhelm von Scholz... tells the story of a mother who took a photograph of her small son in the Black Forest. She left the film to be developed in Strassburg. But, owing to the outbreak of war, she was unable to fetch it and gave it up for lost. In 1916 she bought a film in Frankfurt in order to take a photograph of her daughter, who had been born in the meantime. When the film was developed, it was found to be doubly exposed: the picture underneath was the photograph she had taken of her son in 1914! The old film had not been developed and had somehow got into circulation again among the new films. (Hand pg. 4)

or from another passage in book... 

... Take Major Walter Summerford, who was knocked from his horse by a lightning bolt in Flanders in February 1918, and was temporarily paralyzed from the waist down. After that experience, Summerford moved to Canada, where he took up fishing - only to have the tree he was sitting under struck by lightning in 1924, paralyzing his right side. He recovered, until he was completely paralyzed by yet another lighting strike in 1930, while walking in the park. He died two years later, in 1932 - but not from a lightning strike. But just to rectify the oversight, in 1936 his gravestone was struck by lightning. (Hand, pg.160)


... There's no getting away from it: sometimes events occur which seem so improbable, so unexpected, and so unlikely, they hit that there's something about the universe we don't understand. They make us wonder if the familiar laws of nature and causality, through which we run our everyday lives, occasionally break down. They certainly make us doubt that they can be explained by the accidental confluence of events, by the random throwing together of people and things. They almost suggest that something is exerting an invisible hand. (Hand, pg. 5)

Ah, so this is the cue for that "Uncaused Cause", that "Mind controlling the cosmos" to enter the scene. This is the cue for the New Age "force" at play. The mysteries of energies effecting this or that. This the cue for a karma ideology to step forward. This is the soul of superstition. This is the heart of all things related to antiquated thinking. This is at the heart of prayer of "willing" things of books like "The Secret" promoting "wish boards" of dream prophecies and remote viewing.

The improbability principle according to David J. Hand is defined as extremely improbable events that are commonplace. The improbability principle manifests itself in: 1. Law of Inevitability, 2. The Law of Truly Large Numbers, 3. The Law of Selection, 4. The Law of Probability Lever, and 5. The Law of Near Enough. These come together to form the basis for his book. When we assign meaning to special *rare events or coincidences we are committing a fallacy of human error in misunderstanding the fundamental ways in how the universe operates.

Hand continues to explain,

Borel's law says that we simply should expect (sufficiently) improbable events to happen. But we've seen countless examples of situations where such events /have/ happened - and the Improbability Principle tells us why. It tells us we see them because we've failed to take account the fact that /something/ must occur (the law of inevitability), or the fact that we explored a great many possibilities (the law of truly large numbers), or the fact that we chose what to look at after it had happened (the law of selection), or indeed any of the other strands of the principle. The Improbability Principle tells us that events which we regard as highly improbable occur because we /got things wrong/. If we can find out where we went wrong, then the improbable will become probable. (Hand, pg. 221)

In my situation with my "remote viewing" of the Russian airplane breaking apart in midair it seems I failed to apply the law of selection. The law of selection, according to David J. Hand is, .. you can make probabilities as high as you like if you choose /after/ the event. Also, I failed to take into account the law of truly large numbers which says that, with a large enough number of opportunities, any outrageous thing is likely to happen. (David J. Hand) And the law of inevitability which says that something must happen. This one seems clearest to me and Hand mentions it's one of the most easily ignored.

Now, scientists know that we each have at least four to six periods of dreams a night and that we forget most of them. We're much more likely to recall a dream if something happens the next day which reminds us of it. This is simply an aspect of how the brain works, linking and connecting disparate events. So it's not a case of having one dream which has a precursor of the one event in question. We have many dreams, and each is followed by many events, and we notice those which happen to match, tending to forget all the others. After all, why would we remember them? They're just part of the random background fluctuation of dreams, memories, and events, with nothing special to mark them out. It's the rare "concurrence" of dreaming that something would happen and then it actually happening which is striking. (Hand, pg. 123)

Also, of all possible dreams I have every night I am bound to not just remember one of them and be able to describe it, but one of these dreams is going to be of a nightmarish plane crash. I don't remember every specific detail of images I saw on TV or online in the recent past. I may have came across an image like that earlier and my unconscious picked it up and regurgitated it later in a dream. Planes crash very often and the improbable becomes probable when we realize one of these crashes might at some point coincide with a dream that I happen to remember about a plane crash. Even on the same day. (Law of Inevitability)

I recently had another similar "mysterious" experience in how I went about choosing a winning lottery ticket. I won a few hundred dollars by picking 4 out of 5 numbers correctly. I am aware that playing the lottery is illogical but I do it anyways from time to time with my girlfriend and her family. The odd thing was that when my girlfriend asked me for my numbers I was in my mineralogy lab and picked numbers right in front of me. I glance down at the graph I was looking at. It was a graph charting the various temperature/ mole % of K-feldspar minerals. The % numbers I saw were the exact numbers I texted my girlfriend. She used them. The only number I missed was the number in which I just chose myself because the other % number was too large a number to be chosen for a lottery ticket. Strange, huh?

It gets stranger...

My girlfriend's father picked the /exact/ same numbers I did minus one number and we both won a few hundred dollars (the same amount). So we are inclined to view this through our local intuitions. This is akin to saying the Earth sure looks flat from my viewpoint. The Earth is flat when we are talking about our local view, our subjective viewpoint, through our eyes. These four numbers were not special numbers I "tapped into" magically. They were just numbers in a sea of possible numbers. The law of truly large numbers helps us understand that highly unlikely things will happen often given big enough number selection to play with. We are living in a sea of numbers. Improbable events like picking the right string of numbers happens all the time. Improbably events like dreaming of a plane crash the same night a tragic plane crash happens. Rare events happen all the time.

I understand that this seems like a killjoy. I know, I know .. I'm a buzzkill with all this probability talk. Why destroy the mystique of life? - the fun! It's the same sort of eye roll I get when I am skeptical in ghost-story conversations. I wrote about this in a past blog. It's like pulling the veil off of a magic trick. The magic trick of a universe with a purpose, the magic trick of prophetic dreams and cosmic connections. In the light of mathematical probability laws things like prayer make no sense. We can say this when we know these laws of probabilities and finally understand that there is no "magical-celestial-father-hand" moving about, guiding things in this physical world we find ourselves in.

But this is OK because we are intelligent adults and we should try to understand the way the world /actually/ works. My dream was not "remote viewing", my lottery ticket win was not a magical prophetic event. Laws of probabilities tell us rare events happen all the time. Read this book! There are few books that I say are necessary for living a life aligned with proper thinking (skepticism) A few being - Demon Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan, The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies: How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths by Michael Shermer and this book are on a very short list of must-reads. 

Sources:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/10/31/did-accident-from-14-years-ago-doom-russian-plane-over-egypt.html

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/10/31/russian-plane-crash-egypt/74934010/ 

http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/31/middleeast/egypt-plane-crash/

*Image: http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Mid-air_break-up

The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day by David J. Hand:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-improbability-principle-david-j-hand/1115382497?ean=9780374535001

The graph I picked that contained 4 of 5 winning lottery numbers: