• Sometimes we see meaningful patterns where there is only coincidence.

• Sometimes we see meaningful patterns where there is only coincidence. By the same token, if an event is unusual in our personal experience, we may be unduly amazed. In my math class, I ask, if I flip a coin ten times and the last eight times it comes up heads, how will the next toss turn up? Although most of the students have had high school math, many continue to believe the next toss will probably come up tails, because it seems like that outcome is long overdue. But in fact that changes are even for every toss of the coin, no matter what previous tosses have turned up. As Sagan puts it, “Streakiness, far from being remarkable, is expected, even for random events. What would be amazing would be no streaks.” HHHTHTHHHH looks like a streak, until we see it “embedded in a much longer and less interesting sequence: HHTHTTHHHTHTHHHHHTHTTHTHTT” (371).

Casinos, lottery managers, stockbrokers and spiritual leaders get rich off folks who think they can discover some hidden code in random or near-random sequences.

In the paranormal world, coincidences are often seen as deeply significant. . . . When the connection is made in a manner that seems impossible according to our intuition of the laws of probability, we have a tendency to think something mysterious is at work.
But most people have a poor understanding of the laws of probability. A gambler will win six in a row and then think he is either ‘on a hot streak’ or ‘due to lose.’ Two people in a room of thirty people discover they have the same birthday and conclude that something mysterious is at work. You go to the phone to call your friend Bob. The phone rings and it is Bob. You think, “Wow, what are the chances? Maybe Bob and I are communicating telepathically.’ In fact . . . . the gambler has predicted both possible outcomes, a fairly safe bet! The probability that two people in a room of thirty people will have the same birthday is .71 And you have forgotten how many times Bob did not call under such circumstances, or someone else called, or Bob called but you were not thinking of him, and so on. . . . Slot machines are based on Skinnerian principles of intermittent reinforcement. The dumb human, like the dumb rat, only needs an occasional payoff to keep pulling the handle. . . .
We forget most of the insignificant coincidences and remember the meaningful ones. Our tendency to remember hits and ignore misses is the bread and butter of the psychics, prophets, and soothsayers . . . (Shermer 54).

. . . And politicians, one might add. Reagan’s welfare-queen style of persuasion, when not based on outright lies* , worked by selecting unusual stories, stripping them of context, embedding them in common prejudice and representing them as the underlying pattern of the world.

Sometimes we see these false patterns as forces which we can ride or let guide us, but which we cannot in turn affect. My friends and students will mention dreaming of relatives the night of their accident, or seeing a friend’s favorite breakfast cereal the anniversary of her wedding, or marveling at their power to burn out street lights as they walk along. Clearly it’s comforting for many folks to live amidst signs and wonders, perhaps a token that they are in some way chosen or watched over. But it may discourage us from taking action to change what needs changing.

Conspiracy theories are a variety of the Unseen Forces idea. I do enjoy that little frisson of terror when the Illuminati leave a message in the mist on my mirror while I’m taking a shower, but spending the next decade correlating these cryptic squiggles with the Bible Code, Gnostic poetry, the government’s secret report on UFOs, the pattern of cracks in the sidewalk a la Trashman, and the trails beetle larvae leave in tree bark might not be the best use of my time. Legendary conspiracies depend on the idea that hundreds of people can perform complex operations, over periods of years, in complete secrecy-- a serious misunderstanding of the nature of society and institutions.

Every so often one of the GED students reports that she saw on TV how the wavy flag the astronauts set up on the moon proves they were never there, because . . . the moon has no air! Why do I believe some gringos set foot on the moon almost two generations ago? Not because I know much about technology, nor because I can’t imagine the government and the media lying to us. Rather, I know a great deal about people and institutions and what moves them.

Conspiracies of more than a very few people are hard to maintain, because the more valuable a secret is, the more valuable it is to divulge it. A few years back investigators uncovered a price-fixing conspiracy between the upscale auction houses Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Apparently four or five people knew about the scheme, which continued for the better part of a decade. After a lover’s quarrel, one partner spilled the beans on another. And although there was at first little conclusive evidence, as soon as the prosecutors started shaking the tree, none of the subordinates were willing to hide evidence for their bosses. A more recent example is auditors at Arthur Andersen, who shredded a lot of documents to hide fraud at Enron. One guy had a shredder moved into his office as the scandal began to break, but of course everyone could see the move.

So even if the Apollo moon program were shot in some back lot in Hollywood, too many people would have to be involved; and for almost all of them, the rewards for revealing such a secret would far surpass any possible reward from the project itself. Personally, I prefer the Hollywood studio version of the moon landings, although I know it’s not true. If there were a super secret, and I could see through it --and especially if no one else agrees with me-- why then I must be way ahead of the ignorant millions. Even better, maybe I, too, could be the center of secret knowledge and a world-spanning secret organization.

Needing conspiracies, we overlook the great scandals in front of our noses. Halliburton makes billions from war, quite legally and openly, and few think to question it-- that’s the conspiracy that frightens me.


There is an opposite reaction, the belief that we can manipulate these non-existent forces to make our lives better. Sometimes we call it superstition.

One expectation that human beings cannot live without is that events will have meaning. We do not like to think that they are due to chance to to causes that are too complicated to understand. We want an explanation. This quest for meaning is adaptive because it helps us understand and exert some control over life’s events. Sometimes, however, we see a meaningful pattern or explanation where it doesn’t really exist. Nearly every day the news media present an analysis of yesterday’s rise or drop in stock prices. The change must have been due to international developments, or a recent economic forecast, or what the president did or didn’t do. In actual fact, however, much of the fluctuation in the stock market is completely random” (Shiller, 1987, cited in Wade, Tavris 1993, 288 ).

Experimenters have induced something that looks very much like superstition in pigeons, toddlers, and university students. What they did with the pigeons is to set up an automatic feeding machine that dropped a food pellet into the pigeon cages every fifteen seconds (or some other fixed period). The pigeons could not affect the feeding schedule in any way. But the researchers noticed that the pigeons developed very repetitive behaviors --walking in certain ways, or jerking their heads, or pecking the ground-- each pigeon had its own routine. What had happened was that each pigeon associated its own random actions, whatever they might have been, with the first feedings, and to get more food repeated those actions. Later, other researchers drew preschool kids into repetitive behaviors to get toys, and college kids to score points in a game (Vyse 70-74). In no case could the people or animals actually influence the outcomes, but some developed very persistent responses, what psychologists call “conditioning by coincidence”. Here there was a clear pattern, but pigeons and people did not see the machine behind it, and related it instead to their own actions.

It’s not clear how seriously the people involved took these rituals. As Vyse (75) points out, they may have simply been hedging their bets, performing easy tasks just in case they actually made a difference. People used to sacrifice to the sun god, so I’m told, although they must have been pretty confident the sun would come up every morning regardless. A corresponding situation these days might be someone with a serious illness who goes to the doctor but also buys herbs at the health food store or burns a candle at the church, just in case. He has little to lose in exchange for peace of mind. (Later, if he recovers, even for a few days, he may thank god or the miracle tea, rather than the doctor or his own immune system.) But in other circumstances we may commit very substantial resources to useless behaviors.

The behaviorist school of psychology explores how we can be conditioned to respond in certain predictable ways. We train animals and people to do what we want by responding to their actions with rewards and penalties-- “reinforcement”. Naturally, we tend to repeat the actions for which we’re rewarded, and avoid the rest. The results can be very powerful and long-lasting. I was surprised to find out, however, that the most effective conditioning comes not from consistent reward but from what they call intermittent reinforcement. That is to say, instead of feeding the dog every time he rolls over, once he’s learned the trick, you get a much better response by rewarding him only occasionally.

“A basic principle of operant conditioning is that if you want a response to persist after it has been learned, you should reinforce it intermittently, not continuously. If an animal has been receiving continuous reinforcement for some response and then reinforcement suddenly stops, the animal will soon stop responding. Because the change in reinforcement is large (from continuous to none at all), the animal will easily distinguish the change. But if reinforcement has been only intermittent, the change is not so dramatic, and the animal will keep responding for some period of time. Pigeons, rats, and people on intermittent schedules of reinforcement have responded in the laboratory thousands of times without reinforcement before throwing in the towel, especially on variable schedules. Animals will sometimes work so hard for an unpredictable, infrequent bit of food that the energy they expend is greater than that from the reward; theoretically, the animal could actually work itself to death” (W,T 1993 218).

Elsewhere the writer cites slot machines as a good example of variable pay-offs that keep the suckers coming back for more (W,T 1993 217).

A lot of this behavior operates subconsciously, but I include it here because it’s another example of how ill-equipped we are to make decisions based on probabilities. Think of the abusive spouses, teachers, employers, and public officials we know, and of how hard we work and how patiently we wait for a single kind word, a crumb from the table, perhaps a passing glance of recognition. Think of the respect we accord to those remote authority figures who are much too important to attend to our trivial concerns. Think of the excuses we make for accepting contempt and manipulation, to the point of seeing everything through the boss’ eyes and interests, not through our own. Think how much blood we have shed for these assholes.


• Some kinds of problems lie outside our previous personal experience.
We just don’t live long enough to have a first-hand sense of what it means for radioactive waste to remain deadly for tens of thousands of years, or for the Gulf Stream to turn off, or for a species to be wiped out forever and ever. For that matter, we in the ‘burbs who know only crabgrass and pigeons, can scarcely imagine the dozens of ecosystems wiped in a single day’s land-clearing on the Amazon. We do see war and plague on the telly, sometimes enough to spur us to act.

None of this is to diminish the primacy of personal experience as the core of our knowledge. We are right to be wary of sources of information outside our personal experience. Just as we use information to get what we want, so do others, and their interests might run against our own.

But our personal experience doesn’t always give us enough information to make good decisions. If we’ve been abused as children, we may understand that we should avoid certain parenting practices, but we have little idea what good parenting entails. Our personal experience can give us a framework for understanding, say, the motivations of Muslim suicide bombers, but only if we can begin to see them as people like ourselves. To make that leap we might have to know something about psychology, colonialism, Zionism, and our own religious history.

At the same time, it’s pretty easy to mistake what others tell us for our own first-hand knowledge. Many of us who rightly complain about corporate media are religiously attentive to our favorite sources. There is a wildly out of place tone of worldly skepticism libertarians affect even as they repeat the most banal of corporate cliches. They’ve seen through sentimental myths of handwringing liberals, they tell us, the oppressive dogma of Political Correctness, and have concluded from their researches that rich people get rich because they’re smart and work hard, that people of color understand only bayonets, that technology matters more than social structure. We may no longer notice the master's voice hissing in our ear, because it's so constant; we come to think of it as our own. So to imagine that we come by all our ideas independently is to buy into the most dangerous delusion.

In addition to the way I've been trained, I depend a lot on trial and error. If something doesn't work, I can try a different approach. My mistake may even have shown me what direction I should go in next. This approach doesn't always guarantee solutions, though, because we don't always get accurate feedback from the world. It might take years to get results. There may be many possible reasons to get one result instead of another. The problem itself may change.

When we try to work with other people to develop policy that affects us all, we for sure have to go outside our own experience, and pool information from lots of people. To do that well, we need ways to compare and evaluate all these different sources. Our first-hand knowledge becomes even more valuable when we compare it to others’, and see where it fits in the whole range of collected experience.

* Over a period of about five years, Reagan told the story of the "Chicago welfare queen" who had 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards, and collected benefits for "four nonexisting deceased husbands," bilking the government out of "over $150,000." The real welfare recipient to whom Reagan referred was actually convicted for using two different aliases to collect $8,000. Reagan continued to use his version of the story even after the press pointed out the actual facts of the case to him. (http://www.angelfire.com/co/COMMONSENSE/reagan.html. )