Excerptcize

I am quickly going through one of the excellent Christmas gifts that I received from my parents, Michael Specter’s latest book Denialism, and it is a very enjoyable and informative read. The subtitle is “How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives”! Some heavy stuff. One of the points that Specter makes throughout the book is how bad humans tend to be at calculating and understanding odds. Our brains are capable of a huge array of activities, and can perform many of them with great aplomb and very effectively. Intuition for how probabilities affect us is not one of those activities. While watching some TV the other night a perfect example of this was on display in, of all things, a Canadian Tire ad for wiper blades. In the ad, the spokesperson tells us how her thing is watching the weather channel, so when she had to go pick someone up and she knew there was “only a 5% chance of snow” and wouldn’t be reliant on her old wiper blades. She goes on to say that the forecasters “where wrong”, and we see a visual of her driving through snowy conditions having great difficulty seeing through the windshield. So a probability is put on a particular event of having a 5% chance of happening. This event then does in fact happen. Those who assigned the probability are wrong! The very meaning of probability has been missed. Any event with a low probability of happening eventually does happen. The human brain seems to instinctively find fault with the forecaster though. Specter does a nice job of illustrating how this kind of thinking (amongst other things) can be so problematic. Anyone interested in getting a taste of Specter’s writing can read through the first chapter of the book here. And the next time some poor schmo hits his one out remaining in the deck on the river card, it’s gotta happen sometime, and the game is most likely not rigged!

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