You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs; but you can’t make a quiche without breaking some eggs and sounding pretentious.
I foresee my lovely spouse having this same conversation with our daughters. To paraphrase a conversation with my younger brother in which we reflected upon our childhood:
Bro: I used to think you knew everything about everything. Finally, I realized that you just made stuff up.
Moi: Yes, but I said it with confidence. . .
Being a parent is phenomesome, but it does have drawbacks. In my humble opinion, chief among these is the fact that a parent of small children no longer gets to decide when they get to use the bathroom. A parent’s body decides when it wants to go, but not when it gets to.
In a paper in Science from October 2008, Jennifer Whitson and Adam Galinsky report that placing people in situations where they lack control increases the false perception of patterns because of a need to impose structure on even random events.
This study is very interesting because it helps us understand why we develop superstitions and the like, which are based on false pattern recognition. It does not, however, speculate on why some of those superstitions take hold and last (e.g., buildings without thirteenth floors) and some do not (e.g., my efforts to get my tee ball team to wear pink socks after a 3-4, 4RBI game and a laundry accident).
I, however, am not above some wild speculation. The defense of superstitions, quack medical treatments, etc. frequently goes like this: A medical treatment works or it does not work. If it works, people who use the treatment are more likely to live, people who don’t are more likely to die and the treatment keeps getting used. If it does not work, people who use the treatment are more likely to die, people who don’t are more likely to live and the treatment stops getting used. That makes intuitive sense. It sounds a lot like selection, and we like selection. Continue reading “Why People Believe Silly Things”
The Finch and Pea 