Ron_Tomkins
8th October 2008, 08:51 PM
There's a scene in the movie "Dumb and Dumber" which I think illustrates how most people who lean towards woo, approach the matter.
In the scene, Jim Carrey's character asks the girl he's in love with "What is the chance that you and I could be together?" to which she replies "Honestly? Like... one in a billion". Jim Carrey's face freezes and we get the feeling that he's going to cry. Instead he says "You mean that there IS a chance?" and he bursts into tears but of joy.
Usually people who want so badly to believe in a specific supernatural explanation (for example, that the spots caught on camera were a ghost), will settle with the fact that the scientific reasoning is not that it's entirely impossible that such thing was a ghost. What skeptics explain to them it's that it's not a matter of it being entirely impossible, it's just very very unlikely. To quote one of my favorite ones:
Richard Feynman:
"...I have argued flying saucers with lots of people. (Incidently, I must explain that because I am a scientists does not mean I have not had contact with human beings. Ordinary human beings, I know what they are like. I go to Las Vegas and talk to the show girls and the gamblers and so on. I have banged around alot in my life, so I know about ordinary people.) Anyway, I have to argue about flying saucers on the beach with people, you know. And I was interested in this: they keep arguing that it is possible. And that's true. It is possible. They do not appreciate that the problem is not to demonstrate whether it's possible or not but whether it's going on or not. Whether it's probably occuring or not, not whether it could occur.
"That brings me to the fourth kind of attitude toward ideas, and that is that the problem is not what is possible. That's not the problem. The problem is what is probable, what is happening. It does no good to demonstrate again and again that you can't disprove that this could be a flying saucer. We have to guess ahead of time whether we have to worry about the marian invasion. We have to make a judgement about whether it is a flying saucer, whether it's reasonable, whether it's likely. And we do that on the basis of a lot more experience than whether it's just possible, because the number of things that are possible is not fully appreciated by the average individual. And it is also not clear, then, to them how many things that are possible must not be happening. That it's impossible that everything that is possible is happening. And there is too much variety, so most likely anything that you think of that is possible isn't true. In fact that's a general principle in physics theories: no matter what a guy thinks of, it's almost always false. So there have been five or ten theories that have been right in the history of physics, and those are the ones we want. But that doesn't mean everthing is false. We'll find out."
Indeed, the fallacy seems too huge not to be recognized. To acknowledge the fact that something is not impossible, does not follow that the specific thing you want to believe as an explanation is true. There is also an infinite amount of explanations that are also not impossible and which makes them just as likely (or should as say, as unlikely) to be the actual explanation.
One way to sort out the reality of matters is to ask ourselves: Do I feel any different when thinking of this particular explanation rather than this other one? The real explanation, whatever it is, should have nothing to do with what we wish it was. However, this is where the whole fallacy rests upon. Thus the terminology "wishful thinking".
Now, each one must stop and analyze their own life and check on how many other things does this apply. Because the problem is that, deep down, we are all skeptics to a certain degree... we're not just consistent enough.
In the scene, Jim Carrey's character asks the girl he's in love with "What is the chance that you and I could be together?" to which she replies "Honestly? Like... one in a billion". Jim Carrey's face freezes and we get the feeling that he's going to cry. Instead he says "You mean that there IS a chance?" and he bursts into tears but of joy.
Usually people who want so badly to believe in a specific supernatural explanation (for example, that the spots caught on camera were a ghost), will settle with the fact that the scientific reasoning is not that it's entirely impossible that such thing was a ghost. What skeptics explain to them it's that it's not a matter of it being entirely impossible, it's just very very unlikely. To quote one of my favorite ones:
Richard Feynman:
"...I have argued flying saucers with lots of people. (Incidently, I must explain that because I am a scientists does not mean I have not had contact with human beings. Ordinary human beings, I know what they are like. I go to Las Vegas and talk to the show girls and the gamblers and so on. I have banged around alot in my life, so I know about ordinary people.) Anyway, I have to argue about flying saucers on the beach with people, you know. And I was interested in this: they keep arguing that it is possible. And that's true. It is possible. They do not appreciate that the problem is not to demonstrate whether it's possible or not but whether it's going on or not. Whether it's probably occuring or not, not whether it could occur.
"That brings me to the fourth kind of attitude toward ideas, and that is that the problem is not what is possible. That's not the problem. The problem is what is probable, what is happening. It does no good to demonstrate again and again that you can't disprove that this could be a flying saucer. We have to guess ahead of time whether we have to worry about the marian invasion. We have to make a judgement about whether it is a flying saucer, whether it's reasonable, whether it's likely. And we do that on the basis of a lot more experience than whether it's just possible, because the number of things that are possible is not fully appreciated by the average individual. And it is also not clear, then, to them how many things that are possible must not be happening. That it's impossible that everything that is possible is happening. And there is too much variety, so most likely anything that you think of that is possible isn't true. In fact that's a general principle in physics theories: no matter what a guy thinks of, it's almost always false. So there have been five or ten theories that have been right in the history of physics, and those are the ones we want. But that doesn't mean everthing is false. We'll find out."
Indeed, the fallacy seems too huge not to be recognized. To acknowledge the fact that something is not impossible, does not follow that the specific thing you want to believe as an explanation is true. There is also an infinite amount of explanations that are also not impossible and which makes them just as likely (or should as say, as unlikely) to be the actual explanation.
One way to sort out the reality of matters is to ask ourselves: Do I feel any different when thinking of this particular explanation rather than this other one? The real explanation, whatever it is, should have nothing to do with what we wish it was. However, this is where the whole fallacy rests upon. Thus the terminology "wishful thinking".
Now, each one must stop and analyze their own life and check on how many other things does this apply. Because the problem is that, deep down, we are all skeptics to a certain degree... we're not just consistent enough.