TOK@ISPrague

ll of us, even postmodern philosophers, are naive realists at heart. We assume that the external world maps perfectly onto our internal view of it—an expectation that is reinforced by daily experience. I see a coffee mug on the table, reach for a sip and, lo and behold, the vessel’s handle is soon in my grasp as I gingerly imbibe the hot liquid. Or I see a chartreuse-yellow tennis ball on the lawn, pick it up and throw it. Reassuringly, my dog appears to share my veridical view of reality: she chases the ball and triumphantly catches it between her jaws.

That there should be a match between perception and reality is not surprising, because evolution ruthlessly eliminates the unfit.

Between 1997 and 2007, the rate of autism and organic food sales has risen at the same rate. Obviously, this chart goes to prove that autism and eating organic foods are related to each other and you should avoid organics all together, right? Wrong. This chart is one of the best examples I’ve ever seen detailing how correlation and causation can have absolutely nothing to do with each other. In fact, in many cases, correlation and causation have nothing to do with each other – but what exactly does that mean?

In Latin, the phrase generally used is “cum hoc ergo propter hoc” which translates more literally to “With this therefore because of this.” The opposite, however, is true. Causation proves correlation, but not the other way around.

If a correlation is established, how can you determine causation? Are they caused by the same thing? Does one cause the other? Are they completely unrelated? In order for one event to cause another, they must be related. In other words, there must be some real mechanism connecting the two events (assuming the correlation isn’t completely coincidental). Here, the cause and effect mechanism must comply with the known laws of nature – this (at least) gives us somewhere to start.

The simple question might be “why do such unlikely coincidences occur in our lives?” But the real question is how to define the unlikely. You know that a situation is uncommon just from experience. But even the concept of “uncommon” assumes that like events in the category are common. How do we identify the other events to which we can compare this coincidence? If you can identify other events as likely, then you can calculate the mathematical probability of this particular event as exceptional.

We are exposed to possible events all the time: some of them probable, but many of them highly improbable. Each rare event—by itself—is unlikely. But by the mere act of living, we constantly draw cards out of decks. Because something must happen when a card is drawn, so to speak, the highly improbable does appear from time to time.

Blind to the mathematical odds, we fall to the marketing gods.

“People just aren’t able to grasp 1 in 175 million,” Williams says. “It’s just beyond our experience—we have nothing in our evolutionary history that prepares us or primes us, no intellectual architecture, to try and grasp the remoteness of those odds.” And so we continue to play. And play.

It may seem easy to understand why we keep playing. As one trademarked lottery slogan goes, “Hey, you never know.” Somebody has to win. But to really understand why hundreds of millions of people play a game they will never win, a game with serious social consequences, you have to suspend logic and consider it through an alternate set of rules—rules written by neuroscientists, social psychologists, and economists. When the odds are so small that they are difficult to conceptualize, the risk we perceive has less to do with outcomes than with how much fear or hope we are feeling when we make a decision, how we “frame” and organize sets of logical facts, and even how we perceive ourselves in relation to others. Once you know the alternate set of rules, plumb the literature, and speak to the experts, the popularity of the lottery suddenly makes a lot more sense. It’s a game where reason and logic are rendered obsolete, and hope and dreams are on sale.

Now we are regularly bombarded with new insights into how the unconscious guides our behavior. At the same time, neuroscience has largely debunked the idea of an autonomous self that has the final say in decisions; few science-savvy folks still believe there is a “ghost in the machine,” a little homunculus in the brain who is watching our perceptions or thinking our thoughts. Some philosophers even question whether the conscious mind plays any role in our thoughts. In short, present-day neuroscience has pulled the rug out from under the concept of “the rational man.”

If you are asked why you chose the violin, your answer is unlikely to be an accurate reflection of the unconscious competition that led to your choice. In effect, the decision happened to you. Your brain developed a “violin neural circuit” in the same way that fame makes some actors, musicians, and novelists superstars while others, for reasons that are never entirely clear, are relegated to obscurity.

Imagine that you are a juror assigned to the sentencing phase of a person convicted of first-degree murder. The defendant is a 33-year-old woman who has confessed to shooting her boyfriend in the head, then stabbing him nearly 30 times before unsuccessfully trying to decapitate him with a butcher knife. Initially she tells police she hadn’t been present, that her boyfriend had been killed by “unknown intruders.” When she can offer no evidence to substantiate her alibi, she then confesses, arguing self-defense and that her boyfriend had submitted her to prior physical and mental abuse. On a national TV news show, she predicts that no jury will find her guilty, yet after a several-month trial, you find her guilty of first-degree murder. It is now sentencing time. Your assignment is to determine whether the crime warrants the death penalty or a life sentence without parole, or a lesser sentence with the possibility of parole.

A famous slogan in statistics is that correlation does not imply causation. We know that there is a statistical correlation between eating ice cream and drowning incidents, for instance, but ice cream consumption does not cause drowning. Where any two factors –  A and B – are correlated, there are four possibilities: 1. A is a cause of B, 2. B is a cause of A, 3. the correlation is pure coincidence and 4., as in the ice cream case, A and B are connected by a common cause. Increased ice cream consumption and drowning rates both have a common cause in warm summer weather.

We know that smoking causes cancer. But we also know that many people who smoke don’t get cancer. Causal claims are not falsified by counterexamples, not even by a whole bunch of them. Contraceptive pills have been shown to cause thrombosis, but only in 1 of 1000 women. Following Popper, we could say that for every case where the cause is followed by the effect there are 999 counterexamples. Instead of falsifying the hypothesis that the pill causes thrombosis, however, we list thrombosis as a known side-effect. Causation is still very much assumed even though it occurs only in rare cases.

One could understand a cause, for instance, as a tendency towards its effect. Smoking has a tendency towards cancer, but it doesn’t guarantee it.. Contraception pills have a tendency towards thrombosis but a relatively small one. However, being hit by a train strongly tends towards death. We see that tendencies come in degrees, as do causes, some strongly tending towards their effect and some only weakly.

When people with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory—those who can remember what they ate for breakfast on a specific day 10 years ago—are tested for accuracy, researchers find what goes into false memories.

Hold on to your monocles, friends—the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year for 2013 is “selfie.” It’s an informal noun (plural: selfies) defined as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.” It was first used in 2002, in an Australian online forum (compare the Australian diminutives “barbie” for barbecue and “firie” for firefighter), and it first appeared as a hashtag, #selfie, on Flickr, in 2004.

The word “selfie” is not yet in the O.E.D., but it is currently being considered for future inclusion; whether the word makes it into the history books is truly for the teens to decide. As Ben Zimmer wrote at Language Log, “Youth slang is the obvious source for much of our lexical innovation, like it or not.” And despite its cloying tone, that Oxford Dictionaries blog post from August does allude to the increasingly important distinction between “acronym“ and “initialism”—either of which may describe the expression “LOL,” depending if you pronounce it “lawl” or “ell-oh-ell.” The kids are going to be all right. Not “alright.” But all right.