Pattern-Seeking

UPDATED 09/04/17

Scientists and analysts are reluctant to accept the “stuff happens” explanation for similar but disconnected events. The blessing and curse of the scientific-analytic mind is that it always seeks patterns, even where there are none to be found.

UPDATE 1

The version of this post that appears at Ricochet includes the following comments and replies:

Comment — Cool stuff, but are you thinking of any particular patter/maybe-not-pattern in particular?

My reply — The example that leaps readily to mind is “climate change”, the gospel of which is based on the fleeting (25-year) coincidence of rising temperatures and rising CO2 emissions. That, in turn, leads to the usual kind of hysteria about “climate change” when something like Harvey occurs.

Comment — It’s not a coincidence when the numbers are fudged.

My reply — The temperature numbers have been fudged to some extent, but even qualified skeptics accept the late 20th century temperature rise and the long-term rise in CO2. What’s really at issue is the cause of the temperature rise. The true believers seized on CO2 to the near-exclusion of other factors. How else could they then justify their puritanical desire to control the lives of others, or (if not that) their underlying anti-scientific mindset which seeks patterns instead of truths.

Another example, which applies to non-scientists and (some) scientists, is the identification of random arrangements of stars as “constellations”, simply because they “look” like something. Yet another example is the penchant for invoking conspiracy theories to explain (or rationalize) notorious events.

Returning to science, it is pattern-seeking which drives scientists to develop explanations that are later discarded and even discredited as wildly wrong. I list a succession of such explanations in my post “The Science Is Settled“.

UPDATE 2

Political pundits, sports writers, and sports commentators are notorious for making predictions that rely on tenuous historical parallels. I herewith offer an example, drawn from this very blog.

Here is the complete text of “A Baseball Note: The 2017 Astros vs. the 1951 Dodgers“, which I posted on the 14th of last month:

If you were following baseball in 1951 (as I was), you’ll remember how that season’s Brooklyn Dodgers blew a big lead, wound up tied with the New York Giants at the end of the regular season, and lost a 3-game playoff to the Giants on Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard ’round the world” in the bottom of the 9th inning of the final playoff game.

On August 11, 1951, the Dodgers took a doubleheader from the Boston Braves and gained their largest lead over the Giants — 13 games. The Dodgers at that point had a W-L record of 70-36 (.660), and would top out at .667 two games later. But their W-L record for the rest of the regular season was only .522. So the Giants caught them and went on to win what is arguably the most dramatic playoff in the history of professional sports.

The 2017 Astros peaked earlier than the 1951 Dodgers, attaining a season-high W-L record of .682 on July 5, and leading the second-place team in the AL West by 18 games on July 28. The Astros’ lead has dropped to 12 games, and the team’s W-L record since the July 5 peak is only .438.

The Los Angeles Angels might be this year’s version of the 1951 Giants. The Angels have come from 19 games behind the Astros on July 28, to trail by 12. In that span, the Angels have gone 11-4 (.733).

Hold onto your hats.

Since I wrote that, the Angels have gone 10-9, while the Astros have gone gone 12-8 and increased their lead over the Angels to 13.5 games. It’s still possible that the Astros will collapse and the Angels will surge. But the contest between the two teams no longer resembles the Dodgers-Giants duel of 1951, when the Giants had closed to 5.5 games behind the Dodgers at this point in the season.

My “model” of the 2017 contest between the Astros and Angels was on a par with the disastrously wrong models that “prove” the inexorability of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. The models are disastrously wrong because they are being used to push government policy in counterproductive directions: wasting money on “green energy” while shutting down efficient sources of energy at the cost of real jobs and economic growth.

Politics and Prosperity

“Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure.”

Pattern-Seeking

Share this:

Like this:

Related