You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (6 page)

In 1898, Morgan Robertson wrote a novel titled
Futility
. Given that it was written fourteen years before the
Titanic
sank, eleven years before construction on the vessel even began, the similarities between the book and the real event are eerie. The novel describes a giant boat called the
Titan
which everyone considers unsinkable. It is the largest ever created, and inside, it seems like a luxury hotel—just like the as yet unbuilt
Titanic
.
Titan
had only twenty lifeboats, half of what it would need should the great ship sink. The
Titanic
had twenty-four, also half what it needed. In the book, the
Titan
hits an iceberg in April four hundred miles from Newfoundland. The
Titanic
, years later, would do the same in the same month in the same place. The
Titan
sinks, and more than half of the passengers die, just as with the
Titanic
. The number of people on board who die in the book and the number in the future accident are nearly identical. The similarities don’t stop there. The fictional
Titan
and the real
Titanic
both had three propellers and two masts. Both had a capacity of three thousand people. Both hit the iceberg close to midnight. Did Robertson have a premonition? I mean, what are the odds?

In the 1500s, Nostradamus wrote:

This is often translated to:

That’s rather creepy, considering that it seems to describe a guy with a tiny mustache born about four hundred years later. Here is another prophecy:

Wow. Hister certainly sounds like Hitler, and that second quatrain seems to drive it home. Actually, many of Nostradamus’s predictions are about a guy from Germania who wages a great war and dies mysteriously. What are the odds?

If any of this seems too amazing to be coincidence, too odd to be random, too similar to be chance, you are not so smart. Allow me to explain.

Say you go on a date, and the other person reveals he or she drives the same kind of car you do. It’s a different color, but the same model. Well, that’s sort of neat, but nothing amazing.

Let’s say later on you learn your date’s mom’s name is the same as your mom’s, and your mothers have the same birthday. Hold on a second. That’s pretty cool. Maybe the hand of fate
is
pushing you toward the other person. Later still, you find out you both own the box set of
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
, and you both grew up loving Rescue Rangers. You both love pizza, but hate rutabagas. This is meant to be, you think. You are made for each other.

But, take a step back. Now take another. How many people in the world own that model of car? You are both about the same age, so your mothers are too, and their names were probably common in their time. Since you and your date have similar backgrounds and grew up in the same decade, you probably share the same childhood TV shows. Everyone loves Monty Python. Everyone loves pizza. Many people hate rutabagas.

Looking at the factors from a distance, you can accept the reality of random chance. You are lulled by the signal. You forget about noise. With meaning, you overlook randomness, but meaning is a human construction. You have just committed the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.

The fallacy gets its name from imagining a cowboy shooting at a barn. Over time, the side of the barn becomes riddled with holes. In some places there are lots of them, in others there are few. If the cowboy later paints a bull’s-eye over a spot where his bullet holes clustered together, it looks like he is pretty good with a gun. By painting a bull’s-eye over a cluster of bullet holes, the cowboy places artificial order over natural random chance. If you have a human brain, you do this all of the time. Picking out clusters of coincidence is a predictable malfunction of normal human logic.

When you are dazzled by the idea of Nostradamus predicting Hitler, you ignore how he wrote almost one thousand ambiguous predictions, and most of them make no sense at all. He seems even less interesting when you find out Hister is the Latin name for the Danube River. When you marvel at the similarities between the
Titan
and the
Titanic
, you disregard that in the novel only thirteen people survived, and the ship sank right away, and the
Titan
had made many voyages, and it had sails. In the novel, one of the survivors fought a polar bear before being rescued. When you are befuddled by the Lincoln and Kennedy connections, you neglect to notice Kennedy was Catholic and Lincoln was born Baptist. Kennedy was killed with a rifle, Lincoln with a pistol. Kennedy was shot in Texas, Lincoln in Washington, D.C. Kennedy had lustrous auburn hair, while Lincoln wore a haberdasher’s wet dream.

With all three examples there are thousands of differences, all of which you ignored, but when you draw the bull’s-eye around the clusters, the similarities—whoa. If hindsight bias and confirmation bias had a baby, it would be the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.

When reality shows are filmed, the producers have hundreds of hours of footage. When they condense that footage into an hour, they paint a bull’s-eye around a cluster of holes. They find a narrative in all the mundane moments, extracting the good bits and tossing aside the rest. This means they can create any orderly story they wish from their reserves of chaos. Was that one girl really a horrific bitch? Was that guy with the gelled hair and fake tan really that dumb? Unless you can pull back and see the entire barn, you’ll never know.

The reach of the fallacy is far greater than reality shows, presidential trivia, and spooky coincidences. When you use the sharpshooter fallacy to determine cause from effect, it can harm people. One of the reasons scientists form a hypothesis and then try to disprove it with new research is to avoid the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. Epidemiologists are especially wary of it as they study the factors that lead to the spread of disease. If you look at a map of the United States with dots assigned to where cancer rates are highest, you will notice areas of clumping. It looks like you have a pretty good indication of where the groundwater must be poisoned, or where high-voltage power lines are bombarding people with damaging energy fields, or where cell phone towers are frying people’s organs, or where nuclear bombs must have been tested. A map like that is a lot like the side of the sharpshooter’s barn, and presuming there must be a cause for cancer clusters is the same as drawing bull’s-eyes around them. More often than not, cancer clusters have no scary environmental cause. There are many agents at work. People who are related tend to live near one another. Old people tend to retire in the same areas. Eating, smoking, and exercise habits tend to be similar region to region. And, after all, one in three people will develop cancer in his or her lifetime. To accept that things like residential cancer clusters are often just coincidence is deeply unsatisfying. The powerlessness, the feeling you are defenseless to the whims of chance, can be assuaged by singling out an antagonist. Sometimes you need a bad guy, and the Texas sharpshooter fallacy is one way you can create one.

According to the Centers for Disease Control the number of autism cases among eight-year-olds increased 57 percent from 2002 to the 2006. Looking back over the last twenty years, the rate of autism has gone up 200 percent. Today, one in seventy male children has some form of autism spectrum disorder. It seemed absolutely nuts when those numbers were first released. Parents around the world panicked. Something must be causing autism numbers to rise, right? Early on, a bull’s-eye was painted around vaccines because symptoms seemed to show up about the same time as kids were getting vaccinated. Once they had a target, a cluster, people failed to see all the other correlations. After years of research and millions of dollars, vaccines have been ruled out, but many refuse to accept the findings. Singling out vaccines while ignoring the millions of other factors is the same as noting the
Titan
hit an iceberg but omitting it had sails.

Lucky streaks at the casino, hot hands in basketball, a tornado sparing a church—these are all examples of humans finding meaning after the fact, after the odds are tallied and the numbers have moved on. You are ignoring the times you lost, the times the ball missed the basket, and all the homes the tornado blindly devoured.

In World War II, Londoners took notice when bombing raids consistently missed certain neighborhoods. People began to believe German spies lived in the spared buildings. They didn’t. Analysis afterward by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed the bombing strike patterns were random.

Anywhere people are searching for meaning, you will see the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. For many, the world loses luster when you accept the idea that random mutations can lead to eyeballs or random burn patterns on toast can look like a person’s face.

If you were to shuffle a deck and draw out ten cards, the chances of the sequence you drew coming up are in the trillions, no matter what the cards are. If you drew out an ordered suit, it would be astonishing, but the chances are the same as any other set of ten cards. The meaning is a human construct.

Look outside. See that tree? The chances of it growing there on that spot, on this planet, circling this star, in this galaxy, among the billions of galaxies in the known universe, are so incredibly small it seems to have meaning, but that meaning is only a figment of your imagination. You are drawing a bull’s-eye around a cluster on a vast barn. The odds of it being there are no less astronomical than the odds of it being in the patch of dirt beside it. The same is true if you looked out onto a desert and found a lizard, or into the sky and found a cloud, or into space and saw nothing but hydrogen atoms floating alone. There is a 100 percent chance something will be there, be anywhere, when you look; only the need for meaning changes how you feel about what you see.

To admit the messy slog of chaos, disorder, and random chance rules your life, rules the universe itself, is a painful conceit. You commit the Texas sharpshooter fallacy when you need a pattern to provide meaning, to console you, to lay blame. You mow your lawn, arrange your silverware, comb your hair. Whenever possible, you oppose the forces of entropy and thwart their relentless derangement. Your drive to do this is primal. You need order. Order makes it easier to be a person, to navigate this sloppy world. For ancient man, pattern recognition led to food and protected people from harm. You are able to read these words because your ancestors recognized patterns and changed their behavior to better acquire food and avoiding becoming it. Evolution has made us into beings looking for clusters where chance events have built up like sand into dunes.

Carl Sagan said in the vastness of space and the immensity of time it was a joy to share a planet and epoch with his wife. Even though he knew fate didn’t put them together, it didn’t take away the wonder he felt when he was with her.

You see patterns everywhere, but some of them are formed by chance and mean nothing. Against the noisy background of probability things are bound to line up from time to time for no reason at all. It’s just how the math works out. Recognizing this is an important part of ignoring coincidences when they don’t matter and realizing what has real meaning for you on this planet, in this epoch.

Netflix reveals something about your own behavior you should have noticed by now, something that keeps getting between you and the things you want to accomplish. If you have Netflix, especially if you stream it to your TV, you tend to gradually accumulate a cache of hundreds of films you think you’ll watch one day.

Take a look at your queue. Why are there so damn many documentaries and dramatic epics collecting virtual dust in there? By now you could draw the cover art to
Dead Man Walking
from memory. Why do you keep passing over it?

Psychologists actually know the answer to this question, to why you keep adding movies you will never watch to your growing collection of future rentals, and it’s the same reason you believe you will eventually do what’s best for yourself in all the other parts of your life, but rarely do.

A study conducted in 1999 by Read, Loewenstein, and Kalyanaraman had people pick three movies out of a selection of twenty-four. Some were lowbrow, like
Sleepless in Seattle
or
Mrs. Doubtfire
. Some were highbrow, like
Schindler’s List
or
The Piano
. In other words, it was a choice between movies that promised to be fun and forgettable and those that would be memorable but required more effort to absorb. After picking, the subjects had to watch one movie right away. They then had to watch another in two days and a third two days after that. Most people picked
Schindler’s List
as one of their three. They knew it was a great movie because all of their friends said it was, and it had earned dozens of the highest awards. Most didn’t, however, choose to watch it on the first day. Instead, people tended to pick lowbrow movies on the first day. Only 44 percent went for the heavier stuff first. The majority tended to pick comedies, like
The Mask,
or action flicks, like
Speed,
when they knew they had to watch their choice forthwith. Planning ahead, people picked highbrow movies 63 percent of the time for their second movie and 71 percent of the time for their third. When they ran the experiment again but told subjects they had to watch all three selections back-to-back,
Schindler’s List
was thirteen times less likely to be chosen at all. The researchers had a hunch people would go for the junk food first, but plan healthy meals in the future.