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A Field Guide to Lies
- Historiaцитируетв прошлом году
rovided by the homeowner. But that can’t be true—it would imply that more than 90 percent of home robberies are solved, because some are certainly solved without home video. What the company more likely means is that 90 percent of solved robberies are from video provided by the homeowner.
Isn’t that the same thing?
No, because the sample pool is different. In the first case, we’re looking at all home robberies committed. In the second case we’re looking only at the ones that were solved, a much smaller number. Here it is visually:
All home robberies in a neighborhood:
Solved home robberies in a neighborhood (using the 30 percent figure obtained earlier):
So does that mean that if I have a video camera there is a 90 percent chance that the police will be able to solve a burglary at my house?
No!
All you know is that if a robbery is solved, there is a 90 percent chance that the police were aided by a home video. If you’re thinking that we have enough information to answer the question you’re really interested in (what is the chance that the police will be able to solve a burglary at my house if I buy a home-security system versus if I don’t), you’re wrong—we need to set up a fourfold table like the ones in Part One, but if you start, you’ll see that we have information on only one of the rows. We know which percentage of solved crimes had hIt’s important to pay attention to the wording of the statistic along with the statistic itself. Statistics could be a lie or it could be a misconduct statistic and the person who is giving you that statistic maybe wording it in a wrong manner so it’s wrong. Statistics could be used to manipulate in so many ways that it’s actually hard to believe them
- Historiaцитируетв прошлом годуhe evening is safer (in part because people on the road between two and four a.m. are more likely to be drunk or sleep-deprived).
After the Paris attacks of November 13, 2015, CNN reported that at least one of the attackers had entered the European Union as a refugee, against a backdrop of growing anti-refugee sentiment in Europe. Anti-refugee activists had been calling for stricter border control. This is a social and political issue and it is not my intention to take a stand on it, but the numbers can inform the decision making. Closing the borders completely to migrants and refugees might have thwarted the attacks, which took roughly 130 lives. Denying entry to a million migrants coming from war-torn regions such as Syria and Afghanistan would, with great certainty, have cost thousands of them their lives, far more than the 130 who died in the attacks. There are other risks to both courses of action, and other considerations. But to someone who isn’t thinking through the logic of the numbers, a headline like “One of the attackers was a refugee” inflames the emotions around anti-immigrant sentiment, without acknowledging the many lives that immigration policies saved. The lie that terrorists want you to believe is that you are in immediate and great peril.
Misframing is often used by salespeople to persuade you to buy their products. Suppose you get an email from a home-security company with this pWhen looking at political problems that include statistics and numbers you should always analyze using numbers instead of your emotional preferences. Yes something occurred in this many people died and the reason this many people died is because of this policy. Well you might be angry at the policy you have to take an account how many lives the policy saved I’m not saying it’s Not wrong that the people died by the policy but I’m also saying that because the Baltimore lives were saved
- Historiaцитируетв прошлом годуhe probability is fallacious. Let’s take a step back. What if you hadn’t run into Justin just as you were standing in front of the Mona Lisa, but as you were in front of the Venus de Milo, in les toilettes, or even as you were walking in the entrance? What if you had run into Justin at your hotel, at a café, or the Eiffel Tower? You would have been just as surprised. For that matter, forget about Justin—if you had run into anyone you knew during that vacation, anywhere in Paris, you’d be just as surprised. And why limit it to your vacation in Paris? It could be on a business trip to Madrid, while changing planes in Cleveland, or at a spa in Tucson. Let’s frame the probability this way: Sometime in your adult life, you’ll run into someone you know where you wouldn’t expect to run into them. Clearly the odds of that happening are quite good. But the brain doesn’t automatically think this way—cognitive science has shown us just how necessary it is for us to train ourselves to avoid squishy thinking.
Framing Risk
A related problem in framing probabilities is the failure to frame risks logically. Even counting the airplane fatalities of the 9/11 attacks in the United States, air travel remained (and continues to remain) the safest transportation mode, followed closely by rail transportation. The chances of dying on a commercial flight or train trip are next to zero. Yet, right after 9/11, many U.S. travelers avoided airplanes and took to the highways instead. Automobile deaths increased dramatically. People followed their emotional intuition rather than a logical response, oblivious to the increased risk. The rate of vehicular accidents did not increase beyonWhen looking at statistics and probability do you have to look at it as a whole. Are the chances of something happening one in 1 million yes but will it happen in one’s lifetime probably
- Historiaцитируетв прошлом годуabout 980 total thoughts, and we already know that 50 of those were about people who didn’t phone you, leaving 930 thoughts about things other than people; this is probably an underestimate, but the point is made with any reasonable number you care to put here—try it yourself.)
The brain really only notices the upper left-hand square and ignores the other three, much to the detriment of logical thinking (and to the encouragement of magical thinking). Now, before you book a trip to Vegas to play the roulette wheel, let’s run the numbers. What is the probability that someone will call given that you just thought about them? It’s only two out of fifty-two, or 4 percent. That’s right, 4 percent of the time when you think of someone they call you. That’s not so impressive.
What might account for the 4 percent of the times when this coincidence occurs? A physicist might just invoke the 1,000 events in your fourfold table and note that only two of them (two-tenths of 1 percent) appear to be “weird” and so you should just expect this by chance. A social psychologist might wonder if there was some external event that caused both you and your friend to think of each other, thus prompting the call. You read about the terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13, 2015. Somewhere in the back of your mind, you remember that you and a college friend always talked about going to Paris. She calls you and you’re so surprised to hear from her you forget the Paris connection, but she is reacting to the same event, and that’s why she picked up the phone.
If this reminds you of the twins-reared-apart story earlier, it should. Illusory correlation is the standard explanation offered by behavioral geneticists for the strange confluence of behaviors, such as both twins scratching their heads with their middle finger, or both wrapping tape around pens and pencils to improve their grip. We are fascinated by the contents ofI’m gonna make up this word called pattern blindness. It’s when you’re so focused on seeing patterns and coincidences and things that you’re blind to seeing the entire picture. If you’re looking at two twins for example then you’re just gonna look at the patterns in which they both do. You tend To stop looking for things that they both don’t do. When you’re so caught up in coincidences in patterns. You stop looking at the whole picture and only a part of it
- Historiaцитируетв прошлом годуorder and structure from what often appear to be random configurations. We see Orion the Hunter in the night sky not because the stars were organized that way but because our brains can project patterns onto randomness.
When that friend phones you just as you’re thinking of them, that kind of coincidence is so surprising that your brain registers it. What it doesn’t do such a good job of is registering all the times you didn’t think of someone and they called you. You can think of this like one of those fourfold tables from Part One. Suppose it’s a particularly amazing week filled with coincidences (a black cat crosses your path as you walk by a junkyard full of broken mirrors, make your way up to the thirteenth floor of a building to find the movie Friday the 13th playing on a television set there). Let’s say you get twenty phone calls that week and two of them were from long-lost friends whom you hadn’t thought about for a while, but they called within ten minutes of you thinking of them. That’s the top row of your table: twenty calls, two that you summoned using extrasensory signaling, eighteen that you didn’t. But wait! We have to fill in the bottom row of the table: How many times were you thinking about people and they didn’t call, and—here’s my favorite—how many times were you not thinking about someone and they didn’t call?
Was I Thinking About Them Just Before?
YES
NO
Someone Phoned
YES
2
18
20
NO
50
930The human brain Is an extraordinary object. We are able to recognize patterns better than any animal out there. Even when there isn’t one we create our own
- Historiaцитируетв прошлом годуfollowing:
H: The presence of cadaverous contaminants on the hands of doctors increases chances of infection.
I: If the contaminants are neutralized, infection is not increased.
• • •
Of course, an alternative I was possible too: If the workers in the two divisions were switched (if midwives delivered in division one and medical students in division two) infection would be decreased. This is a valid implication too, but for two reasons switching the workers was not as good an idea as getting the doctors to wash their hands. First, if the hypothesis was really true, the death rate at the hospital would remain the same—all Semmelweis would have done was to shift the deaths from one division to another. Second, when not delivering babies, the doctors still had to work in their labs in division one, and so there would be an increased delay for both sets of workers to reach mothers in labor, which could contribute to additional deaths. Getting the doctors to wash their hands had the advantage that if it worked, the death rate throughout the hospital would be lowered.
Semmelweis conducted the experiment by asking the doctors to disinfect their hands with a solution containing chlorine. The mortality rate in the firstWhen you test a hypothesis and it works you repeat it over and over again and it seems to work over and over again that means you’ve created a theory but Theory is a fancy word. In this case this is a brand new scientific discovery
- Historiaцитируетв прошлом годуother.
One explanation offered by a board of inquiry was that the configuration of the first division promoted psychological distress: Whenever a priest was called in to give last rites to a dying woman, he had to pass right by maternity beds in the first division to get to her; this was preceded by a nurse ringing a bell. The combination was believed to terrify the women giving birth and therefore make them more likely victims of this “childbed fever.” The priest did not have to pass by birthing mothers in the second division when he delivered last rites because he had direct access to the room where dying women were kept.
Semmelweis proposed a hypothesis and implication that described an experiment:
H: The presence of the ringing bell and the priest increases chances of infection.
I: If the bell and priest are not present, infection is not increased.
Semmelweis persuaded the priest to take an awkward, circuitous route to avoid passing the birthing mothers of the first division, and he persuaded the nurse to stop ringing the bell. The mortality rate did not decrease.
I is not true.
Therefore H is false.
We reject the hypothesis after careful experimentation.
Semmelweis entertained other hypotheses. It wasn’t overcrowding, because, in fact, the second division was the more crowded one. It wasn’t temperature or humidity, because they were the same in the two divisions. As often happens in scientific discovery, a chance event, purely serendipitous, led to an insight. A good friend of Semmelweis’s was accidentally cut by the scalpel of a student who had just finished performing an autopsy. The friend became very sick, and the subsequent autopsy revealed some of the same signs of infection as were found in the women who were dying during childbirth. Semmelweis wondered if there wasThis is the basic scientific experiment. You create a hypothesis, you test it, make observations and see if it actually works. If it doesn’t work then you hypothesis is wrong
- Historiaцитируетв прошлом годуor more statements, or premises. (A statement without evidence, or without a conclusion, is not an argument in this sense of the word.)
Arguments set up a system. We often begin with the conclusion—I know this sounds backward, but it’s how we typically speak; we state the conclusion and then bring out the evidence.
Conclusion: Jacques cheats at pool.
Evidence (or premise): When your back was turned, I saw him move the ball before taking a shot.
Deductive reasoning follows the process in the opposite direction.
Premise: When your back was turned, I saw him move the ball before taking a shot.
Conclusion: Jacques cheats at pool.
This is closely related to how scientists talk about the results of experiments, which are a kind of argument, again in two parts.
Hypothesis = H
Implication = I
H: There are no black swans.
I: If H is true, then neither I nor anyone else will ever see a black swan.
But I is not true. My uncle Ernie saw a black swan, and then took me to see it too.
Therefore, reject H.
A Deductive Argument
The germ theory of disease was discovered through the application of deduction. Ignaz Semmelweis was a Hungarian physician who conducted a set of experiments (twelve years before Pasteur’s germ and bacteria research) to determine what was causing high mortality rates at a maternity ward in the Vienna General Hospital. The scientific method was not well established at that point, but his systematic observations and manipulations helped not only to pinpoint the culprit, butIn argument consists of a statement or a series of statements trying to out logic each other. They include an evidence and a Conclusion. In human conversation people usually introduced to conclusion first and then they provide the evidence. No one provides evidence first because you have no contacts for the evidence of white significant you provide the conclusion first and then provide evidence which is relevant to conclusion or your statement
- Historiaцитируетв прошлом годуgreat fictional detective Sherlock Holmes draws conclusions through clever reasoning, and although he claims to be using deduction, in fact he’s using a different form of reasoning called abduction. Nearly all of Holmes’s conclusions are clever guesses, based on facts, but not in a way that the conclusion is airtight or inevitable. In abductive reasoning, we start with a set of observations and then generate a theory that accounts for them. Of the infinity of different theories that could account for something, we seek the most likely.
For example, Holmes concludes that a supposed suicide was really a murder:
HOLMES: The wound was on the right side of his head. Van Coon was left-handed. Requires quite a bit of contortion.
DETECTIVE INSPECTOR DIMMOCK: Left-handed?
HOLMES: Oh, I’m amazed you didn’t notice. All you have to do is look around this flat. Coffee table on the left-hand side; coffee mug handle pointing to the left. Power sockets: habitually used the ones on the left . . . Pen and paper on the left-hand side of the phone because he picked it up with his right and tookDeduction an induction are used in fact you were given and making factual observations based on what you see. Abduction is using observations and making highly likely Predictions about what occurred
- Historiaцитируетв прошлом годуore or less than a non-pilot.
The great fictional detective Sherlock Holmes draws conclusions through clever reasoning, and although he claims to be using deduction, in fact he’s using a different form of reasoning called abduction. Nearly all of Holmes’s conclusions are clever guesses, based on facts, but not in a way that the conclusion is airtight or inevitable. In abductive reasoning, we start with a set of observations and then generate a theory that accounts for them. Of the infinity of different theories that could account for something, we seek the most likely.
For example, Holmes concludes that a supposed suicide was really a murder:
HOLMES: The wound was on the right side of his head. Van Coon was left-handed. Requires quite a bit of contortion.
DETECTIVE INSPECTOR DIMMOCK: Left-handed?
HOLMES: Oh, I’m amazed you didn’t notice. All you have to do is look around this flat. Coffee table on the left-hand side; coffee mug handle pointing to the left. Power sockets: habitually used the ones on the left . . . Pen and paper on the left-hand side of the phone because he picked it up with his right and took down messages with his left . . . There’s a knife on the breadboard with butter on the right side of the blade because he used it with his left. It’s highly unlikely that a left-handed man would shoot himself in the right side of his head. Conclusion: Someone broke in here and murdered him . . .
DIMMOCK: But the gun . . . why—
HOLMES: He was waiting for the killer. He’d been threatened.
Note that Sherlock uses the phrase highly unlikely. This signals that he’s not using deduc
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