Re:Higher-level causation exists (but I wish it didn’t)
by Mathnerd314 on Sunday June 04, 2017 @08:44PM
(#14484572)
> Reverse Hollywoodism: The forces of good have every possible advantage, from money to expertise to knowledge to overwhelming numerical superiority. Yet somehow good still fumbles. Somehow a string of improbable coincidences, or a black swan or an orange Hitler, show up at the last moment to let horribleness eke out a last-minute victory, as if the universe itself had been rooting for horribleness all along. That’s our world.
> So-called laws like Murphy's law and Sod's law are nonsense because they require inanimate objects to have desires of their own, or else to react according to one's own desires. Dawkins points out that a certain class of events may occur all the time, but are only noticed when they become a nuisance. He gives as an example aircraft noise interfering with filming. Aircraft are in the sky all the time, but are only taken note of when they cause a problem. This is a form of confirmation bias whereby the investigator seeks out evidence to confirm his already formed ideas, but does not look for evidence that contradicts them.
> The law of truly large numbers should lead one to expect the kind of events predicted by Murphy's law to occur occasionally. Selection bias will ensure that those ones are remembered and the many times Murphy's law was not true are forgotten.
So reverse hollywoodism is really a theory on the limitations of humans in their ability to be scientific: when humans go from the data to the trends (stories), they ignore/distort some of the information to fit the narrative. (See e.g. Trump's election; really not that unpredictable, given data like https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/23/tr..., but easy to miss when reading the headlines)
This is kind of like Murphy's Law. Let's quote Richard Dawkins and Richard Hand from the Wikipedia article: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy%27s_law)
> So-called laws like Murphy's law and Sod's law are nonsense because they require inanimate objects to have desires of their own, or else to react according to one's own desires. Dawkins points out that a certain class of events may occur all the time, but are only noticed when they become a nuisance. He gives as an example aircraft noise interfering with filming. Aircraft are in the sky all the time, but are only taken note of when they cause a problem. This is a form of confirmation bias whereby the investigator seeks out evidence to confirm his already formed ideas, but does not look for evidence that contradicts them.
> The law of truly large numbers should lead one to expect the kind of events predicted by Murphy's law to occur occasionally. Selection bias will ensure that those ones are remembered and the many times Murphy's law was not true are forgotten.
So reverse hollywoodism is really a theory on the limitations of humans in their ability to be scientific: when humans go from the data to the trends (stories), they ignore/distort some of the information to fit the narrative. (See e.g. Trump's election; really not that unpredictable, given data like https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/23/tr..., but easy to miss when reading the headlines)